Prose in the Age of Poets : Romanticism and Biographical Narrative From Johnson to De Quincey

In __Prose in the Age of Poets__, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, Johnson, biography and autobiography, and narrative theory. In __Prose in the Age of Poets__, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, Johnson, biography and autobiography, and narrative theory.

In Prose in the Age of Poets, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The rise of interest in the individual traditionally associated with Romantic autobiography was actually part of a wider cultural interest in biography—especially literary biography.

Following Johnson's lead in the Lives of the Poets, virtually every major writer of the period experimented with sequences of short, anecdotal lives that became a characteristic Romantic vehicle for discussing theories of creativity, canon, and the place of the poet in society. The Romantics took in new directions the examination of the relation of artists' lives and works, biographers and their subjects, and texts and their readers. Romantic biography, Cafarelli contends, offers a perspective from which to reconsider conventional boundaries of genre, periodization, and the movement from Neoclassicism to Romanticism.

In examining the Romantics as prose writers and biographers, Cafarelli explores the affiliations between Romantic theories of reading and writing and twentieth-century critical methodologies. She situates the biographical writings of the major poets, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, in the context of detailed analyses of biographies by Johnson, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Scott, Southey, and other lesser-known contemporaries.

Prose in the Age of Poets will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, Johnson, biography and autobiography, and narrative theory.

In Prose in the Age of Poets , Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The rise of interest in the individual traditionally associated with Romantic autobiography was actually part of a wider cultural interest in biography—especially literary biography. Following Johnson's lead in the Lives of the Poets , virtually every major writer of the period experimented with sequences of short, anecdotal lives that became a characteristic Romantic vehicle for discussing theories of creativity, canon, and the place of the poet in society. The Romantics took in new directions the examination of the relation of artists' lives and works, biographers and their subjects, and texts and their readers. Romantic biography, Cafarelli contends, offers a perspective from which to reconsider conventional boundaries of genre, periodization, and the movement from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In examining the Romantics as prose writers and biographers, Cafarelli explores the affiliations between Romantic theories of reading and writing and twentieth-century critical methodologies. She situates the biographical writings of the major poets, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, in the context of detailed analyses of biographies by Johnson, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Scott, Southey, and other lesser-known contemporaries. Prose in the Age of Poets will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, Johnson, biography and autobiography, and narrative theory. Contents Acknowledgments Chapter I. Introduction: Biography as Symbolic Narrative Chapter II. Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Poets as a Collective Sequence Chapter III. The Romantic Agenda: Johnson and the Romantic Canon Chapter IV. William Hazlitt: Narrative Hieroglyphics Chapter V. Thomas De Quincey: The Allegory of Everyday Life Notes Select Bibliography Name Index Subject Index