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'The Domestication of Genius - Biography and the Romantic Poet', published in November 2009.

'The Domestication of Genius - Biography and the Romantic Poet'

Lecturer in School of English publishes new book

• The most comprehensive account to date of a fascinating body of literature: the nineteenth-century Lives of the Romantic poets
• An extensive and detailed discussion of literary biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s
• Introductory chapters are on the history of biography as a genre, followed by chapters focused on six major poets of the period

This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the Lives of six major poets of the period: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, and others. It situates these within the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s.

Starting with Johnson, Boswell, and female collective Lives, it looks at how the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers 'domesticated' Byron, Shelley, and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their (often scandalous) private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness.

Biography was an influential transmitter of the myth of 'the Romantic poet', as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader.

The Domestication of Genius is the most comprehensive account to date of the shaping of the Romantic poets by biography in the nineteenth-century. Written in a lively and accessible style, it casts new light on the literary culture of the 1830s and the transition between Romantic and Victorian conceptions of authorship. It offers a powerful re-evaluation of Romantic literary biography, of major biographers of the period, and of the posthumous reputations of the Romantic poets.

Julian North is Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester

• Title: The Domestication of Genius - Biography and the Romantic Poet
• Author: Julian North
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Price: £55.00
• Pages: 272 pages
• Published: November 2009
• ISBN: 978-0-19-957198-7

Click here for more information or to purchase a copy.