LAKE POETS AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY.
Series: CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM; 71
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS; Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: CAMBRIDGE
Language: und; eng
Number of pages: 297
Description: "The idea that the inspired poet stands apart from the marketplace is considered central to British Romanticism. However, Romantic authors were deeply concerned with how their occupation might be considered a kind of labor comparable to that of the traditional professions. In the process of defining their work as authors, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge - the "Lake school"--Aligned themselves with emerging constructions of the "professional gentleman" that challenged the vocational practices of late eighteenth-century British culture. They modeled their idea of authorship on the learned professions of medicine, church, and law, which allowed them to imagine a productive relationship to the marketplace and to adopt the ways eighteenth-century poets had related their poetry to other kinds of intellectual work. Brian Goldberg explores the ideas of professional risk, evaluation, and competition that the writers developed as a response to a variety of eighteenth-century depictions of the literary career."--Jacket.