Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783-1834

by James Treadwell

What did autobiography mean to Romantic readers and writers? How do autobiographical texts of the period reflect, express, and negotiate these conditions? Answering these questions and more, James Treadwell examines a wide variety of Romantic texts, with single chapters devoted to works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb. By preserving a continuous relation between the texts and their contexts, this book offers the first proper study of what is actually meant by "Romantic autobiography."

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 2005

About the author

James Treadwell was born in West London and is still living there more than forty years on. Formerly an academic specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, he is now, and hopes always to be, a writer of fantasy novels.

His current vocation can probably be blamed on reading Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen and Barbara Leonie Picard’s retellings of the Iliad and Odyssey at a formative age. Once exposed to such lethal doses of the faraway and the solemn and the strange, he inevitably found his way to Narnia and Middle Earth and Gormenghast and Earthsea and Pern and Britain (but it was Susan Cooper’s Britain). He played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons at school and read a lot of serious fantasy at university; despite that, he still managed to make a start on a scholarly career before the chance to become a full-time writer presented itself.

He has lived in London, Oxford and Montréal, but really always in London, where he’s now settled with his wife and two children.