ABSTRACT
James Treadwell suggests that Romantic era autobiographical writing existed in a sort of no-person's-land when it came to literary genre. Autobiography, Olney writes, 'refuses, simply, to be a literary genre like any other'. These literary productions, then, are at heart virtuoso pieces in which the composer sets out to demonstrate both his versatility and his artistry, even when claiming to be providing a candid and unaffected self-portrait. Georges Gusdorf famously wrote that autobiography is 'the mirror in which the individual reflects his own image' a formulation that seems to exclude the very real possibility that the individual and the self-image as portrayed in autobiographical writing may not coincide nearly so neatly. Virtually every study of Romantic era autobiographical writing cites James Olney's famous declaration that when it comes to defining 'autobiography'. Blake's prophetic writings share many of these features, including the characteristic way they assemble within individual moments of narration an array of historical and mythical characters.
