Abstract
ABSTRACT This article reads selected biographical work by Hazlitt, De Quincey and Trelawny on a range of key figures—chiefly, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. In line with extant scholarship, its aim is to trace how these auto/biographic texts endeavor to disentangle auto from bios; that is, how they construct the authors whose lives they recount to carve out a space for the biographer, rather than for his subject. The article makes a distinct contribution in specifically reading this competitive dialectic of major and minor authorship in historiographic terms. The writers analyzed will be shown to activate a historical construction of Romanticism, at once insisting on the representative termination of the writers whose lives are recounted, as well as on their own capacity to succeed where the former failed. Such biographic historicism finally effects the construction of a late-Romantic subperiod, which in turn redounds on what was beginning to be periodized as Romanticism.
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