Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey

In Prose in the Age of Poets, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The rise of interest in the individual traditionally associated with Romantic autobiography was actually part of a wider cultural interest in biography—especially literary biography.

Following Johnson's lead in the Lives of the Poets, virtually every major writer of the period experimented with sequences of short, anecdotal lives that b...