ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the debatable, unsystematic, and hybrid practice of Romantic autobiography in England from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of genres and modes, and by a broad spectrum of practitioners, from the high and the semi to the non-canonical. It considers different modes of Romantic autobiography that also constitute distinct subgenres of the larger category. Autobiography is always a performance, though it may turn out to be a failed one, as in Rousseau's case, when at the end of Part II of his Confessions his narrative of his reading of them in Paris results in the ambiguous anticlimax of his audience's utter silence. The book covers a broad spectrum of Romantic self-writing in England by both men and women. It examines the variety of women's self-writing without reducing it to any straightforward gender binary.