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

by Higgins; David

• ISBN13: 9780415335560
• ISBN10: 0415335566
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-10-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 inthe 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.

Author Biography

David Higgins is a Lecturer in English at the University of Chester

Table of Contents

List of plates	ix
Acknowledgements	x
List of abbreviations	xi
Introduction	1	(11)
Literary genius, transgression and society in the early nineteenth century	12	(34)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Reviews	13	(3)
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine	16	(3)
Blackwood's and Percy Bysshe Shelley	19	(4)
Evangelicalism and the dangers of genius	23	(5)
Fraser's Magazine	28	(3)
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and Edward Lytton Bulwer	31	(6)
John Stuart Mill and the Monthly Repository	37	(3)
Fraser's and the (in)dignity of literature	40	(5)
Conclusion	45	(1)
Literary biography and its discontents	46	(14)
Biographical debates: William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle	47	(4)
Biographical debates: William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Isaac D'Israeli	51	(4)
The problem of `personality'	55	(5)
Magazine biography in the late Romantic period	60	(30)
Literary portraits: William Hazlitt and William Maginn	61	(13)
Literary reminiscences: Leigh Hunt and Thomas Jefferson Hogg	74	(8)
Literary reminiscences: Richard Pearse Gillies on Scott	82	(3)
Thomas De Quincey's `Lake Reminiscences' and Tait's Edinburgh Magazine	85	(5)
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the construction of Wordsworth's genius	90	(12)
Wordsworth's reception	91	(1)
Blackwood's and Wordsworth	92	(3)
The `Letters from the Lakes'	95	(7)
William Hazlitt and the degradation of genius	102	(25)
Genius and power	103	(2)
Understanding apostasy	105	(6)
`Mr Coleridge's Lay Sermon'	111	(2)
Genius, literature and liberalism	113	(10)
The failure of the Liberal	123	(4)
`The Quack Artist': Benjamin Robert Haydon and the dangers of publicity	127	(20)
Haydon on genius, high art and the public	128	(3)
Haydon in the press, 1814--20	131	(7)
Haydon in the press, 1820--46	138	(3)
Cruikshank on Haydon: two caricatures	141	(6)
Conclusion	147	(4)
Notes	151	(26)
Bibliography	177	(12)
Index	189