Download Life Writings 1700-1850 The first part of the course, taught by

Life Writings 1700-1850
The first part of the course, taught by Professor Clare Brant, will look at a selection of
life writing texts representative of principal genres of the eighteenth century. The second
part, taught by Dr Chris Ewers, will look at a selection of texts representative of later
eighteenth-century and Romantic life writings.
The 18C texts can be read on ECCO as well as in modern editions.
1. Introduction: life writing, lives and the eighteenth century
2. Epistolary lifewriting: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters, particularly the Turkish
Embassy Letters
3. Life writing and children: Lord Chesterfield, Letters (Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics)
4. Life writing and scandal: Charlotte Charke A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte
Charke (1755)
5. Samuel Johnson as object of biography: Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791; Penguin
edition is fine), Hester Thrale Piozzi Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786)
6 Life writing and religion: William Cowper, Adelphi
7 reading week
8 Life writing and memory: William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799/1805; Norton
edition also gives you 1850 version)
9 Life writing and place: Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals (& John Clare)
10 Confessional life writing De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
11 Life writing and biofiction: Byron, Childe Harold, Don Juan (& Oriental Tales)
12 essay consultations
Further reading:
David Amigoni, Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Ashgate, 2006)
Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford, 1999)
John Batchelor, ed., The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford, 1995)
Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge, 1999)
Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2006)
Martine Watson Brownley, "Johnson's Lives of the English Poets and Earlier Traditions
of the Character Sketch in England" in James Engell, ed., Johnson and His Age (Harvard,
1984)
Carolyn A. Barros and Johanna M. Smith eds., Life-Writings by British Women, 16601815
(Northeastern, 2000)
Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical
Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Pennsylvania Press, 1990)
Amy Culley British Women’s Life Writing 1760-1840 (Palgrave 2015)
Amy Culley and Daniel Cook (eds) Women's Life Writing, 1700-1850: Gender, Genre
and Authorship (Palgrave 2012).
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: the Shaping Influence in NineteenthCentury Literature (Oxford, 2002)
Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge, 1995)
---, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (Columbia, 1999)
*Peter France and William St Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography
(Oxford, 2002)
Francis R. Hart, "Boswell and the Romantics: A Chapter in the History of Biographical
Theory", English Literary History 27.1 (1960), pp. 44-65
David Minden Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography,
Celebrity and Politics (Routledge, 2005)
Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in
Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005)
*Laura Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester,
1994)
Julian North, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford,
2009)
*Alan Rawes and Arthur Bradley, eds., Romantic Biography (Ashgate, 2003)
Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen: Letter-Writing in the Age of Johnson (Yale,
1984)
John Richetti, "Writing About Defoe: What Is a Critical Biography?" Literature Compass
3/2 (2006), pp.65-79
Dale Salwak, ed., The Literary Biography (Macmillan, 1996)
Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660-1800 (Oxford,
2009)
Useful background to the Enlightenment
*Roy Porter, Enlightenment and the Creation of the Modern World (Penguin, 2001)
Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (Penguin, 2004)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science (HarperPress, 2008)
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (Faber, 2003)
Political history and philosophy
*Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its
Background, 1760-1830.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford
World’s Classics, 2008)
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), ed. Roger Woolhouse
(Penguin Classics, 2004)
Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture
in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Penguin Great Ideas Series, 2004)
Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: A
Selected Edition, ed.Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008)
---, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
General secondary reading
G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (Chicago, 1992)
Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, eds., Women, Texts & Histories, 1525-1790 (Routledge,
1992)
Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800 (Longman,
2001)
Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2003)
Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu, eds., British Romanticism and the Edinburgh
Review
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford, 2009)
Eger, Grant, O’Gallchoir and Warburton, eds., Women, Writing and the Public Sphere,
1770-1830 (Cambridge, 2001)
Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters
(Cambridge,1993)
Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, eds., Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction,
Culture (Virginia,2000)
Amanda K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830
(Cambridge, 1993)
Vivien Jones, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 (Cambridge, 2000)
Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison, 1987)
*Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983)
--- The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford, 1996)
Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: the Anxiety of Perception (Oxford,
2000)
Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in EighteenthCenturyEngland (Johns Hopkins, 1989)
Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2001)
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago, 2003)