ABSTRACT
Beaujour takes up several points of disagreement with Philippe Lejeune's influential definition of autobiography as a 'retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality'. Beaujour argues instead that there is, in fact, a separate genre distinct from autobiography which he calls the 'literary self-portrait'. William Hazlitt's position as another under-examined Romantic-era writer has masked his importance as a major literary self-portraitist in the Romantic period. The familiar languages of Lamb's, Wollstonecraft's, and Hazlitt's essays all include internal address to their personal circle of friends that simultaneously make the reader an 'intimate' of these literate, insightful, and often witty observers of contemporary life. This important and influential rhetorical stance continued to grow and develop in the generation immediately following Wollstonecraft's, especially in the 'familiar essays' of Hazlitt and Lamb as well as in the poetry and prose of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
