Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics

ISBN-13: 9780415654098 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 192 str.

Higgins, David

Opis

In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was unprecedented interest in the subject of genius, as well as in the personalities and private lives of creative artists. This was also a period in which literary magazines were powerful arbiters of taste, helping to shape the ideological consciousness of their middle-class readers. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine considers how these magazines debated the nature of genius and how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses. Romantic writers often imagined genius to be a force that transcended the realms of politics and economics. David Higgins, however, shows in this text that representations of genius played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within early nineteenth-century literary culture. Furthermore, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine bridges the gap between Romantic and Victorian literary history by considering the ways in which Romanticism was understood and sometimes challenged by writers in the 1830s.It not only discusses a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, but also examines the various structures in which these authors had to operate, making it an interesting and important book for anyone working on Romantic literature.

Spis treści

List of Plates  Acknowledgments  List of Abbreviations  Introduction  1. Literary Genius, Transgression and Society in the Early Nineteenth Century  Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Reviews  Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine  Blackwood’s and Percy Bysshe Shelley  Evangelicalism and the Dangers of Genius  Fraser’s Magazine  Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and Edmund Lytton Bulwer  John Stuart Mill and the Monthly Repository  Fraser’s and the (In)Dignity of Literature  Conclusion  2. Literary Biography and its Discontents  Biographical Debates: William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle  Biographical Debates: William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Isaac D’Israeli  The Problem of ‘Personality’  3. Magazine Biography in the Late Romantic Period  Literary Portraits: William Hazlitt and William Maginn  Literary Reminiscences: Leigh Hunt and Thomas Jefferson Hogg  Literary Reminiscences: Richard Pearse Gillies on Scott  Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’ and Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine  4. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of Wordworth's Reception  Wordsworth’s Reception  Blackwood’s and Wordsworth  The ‘Letters from the Lakes’ 5. William Hazlitt and the Degradation of Genius  Genius and Power  Understanding Apostasy  ‘Mr Coleridge’s Lay Sermon’  Genius, Literature, and Liberalism  The Failure of the Liberal  6. 'The Quack Artist': Benjamin Robert Haydon and the Dangers of Publicity  Haydon on Genius, High Art, and the Public  Haydon in the Press, 1814-20  Haydon in the Press, 1820-46  Cruikshank on Haydon: Two Caricatures  Conclusion  Bibliography   

O autorze

David Higgins is a Lecturer in English at University College Chester, and has published articles on Wordsworth, Hazlitt and nineteenth-century constructions of race.