Romantic genius and the literary magazine
Subtitle: biography, celebrity and politics
By: David Higgins.
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
Subjects: Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 1786-1846 -- Appreciation -- Great Britain.; Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850 -- Appreciation -- Great Britain.; Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830 -- Appreciation -- Great Britain.; English prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Authors, English -- Biography -- History and criticism.; Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; Celebrities -- Great Britain -- Biography -- History and criticism.; English periodicals -- History -- 19th century.; Genius -- History -- 19th century.; Biography as a literary form.; Romanticism -- Great Britain.
Description: "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, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine also 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada.
Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Literary genius, transgression, and society in the early nineteenth century; title: Literary biography and its discontents; title: Magazine biography in the late romantic period; title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the construction of Wordsworth's genius; title: William Hazlitt and the degradation of genius; title: The quack artist: Benjamin Robert Haydon and the dangers of publicity.