ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role of literary magazines in the Romantic construction of genius, and the importance of representations of genius in terms of the self-fashioning of those magazines. These representations were crucial for the formulation and dissemination of ‘Romantic ideology’ but they were riven by tension and contradiction. If discussions of genius may, from a modern perspective, seem to have become marginalized, the Romantic creative artist was at the same time granted a great deal more cultural authority than had been the case during the eighteenth century. The Romantic separation of art and life – the claim that ‘only a poet and his works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by “the world” of politics and money’ – has been identified by Jerome McGann as one of the ‘basic illusions of Romantic Ideology’. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
