Short description:

Considering how literary magazines in early nineteenth-century Britain debated the nature of genius, as well as how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses, this is an important work for anyone working on Romantic literature.

Long 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. 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 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.

'David Higgins's readable and well-researched study contributes to the project of resituating key concepts of Romantic poetics within the print culture of the period.' - Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780 - 1840

'...a learned and persuasive account of how the society of the 1820s and 1830s simultaneously constructed and deconstructed romantic genius, and should be must reading for both romanticists and historians of the periodical.' - David Latane, European Romantic Review

Table of Contents:

Introduction, David Higgins; Chapter 1 Literary genius, transgression and society in the early nineteenth century, David Higgins; Chapter 2 LiteraryMagazineBlackwood?s Edinburgh Magazine and the construction of Wordsworth?s genius, David Higgins; Chapter 5 William Hazlitt and the degradation of genius, David Higgins; Chapter 6 ?The Quack Artist?, David Higgins; Chapter 102 Conclusion, David Higgins;