Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography

This is a reassessment of the practice and theory of autobiography in the 19th century, using contemporary and more recent interpretative approaches. It deals with a range of authors, canonical and non-canonical: Romantics - Wordsworth, de Quincey and Leigh Hunt; intellectuals - Carlyle, Mill and Newman; women writers - Wollstonecraft, Eliot, Martineau and others; late threshold figures "Mark Rutherford" and Conan Doyle; and Americans Mary Chestnut and Walt Whitman. The contributors considers the autobiographical impulse, exponents and groups in their own right but also in relation to major aestetic, cultural and philosophic issues such as interextuality, gender representation, nationality, spiritual quest and the chllenge of seculatization.