Romantic Autobiography in England

It was during the Romantic period, early in the 19th century, that autobiography emerged as a distinct genre and began infecting all of literature with its pretension. American scholars of English literature look at the crossing of the genre and the school from perspectives of the variety of women's life writing, male self-fashioning, and genres and modes. Their topics include displacement of the autobiographical self in Dorothy Wordsworth and Gertrude Stein, the Gothic structure of Mary Robinson's Memoirs, writing lives and gendering history in May Hays' 1803 Female Biography, the reinvention of Joseph Severn as the friend of Keats, the staged presence in Romantic autobiography, Ned Ludd and laboring-class autobiography, and essay as autobiography in Romanticism. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Eugene Stelzig is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at SUNY-Geneseo, USA