The Romantic Art of Confession: De Quincey, Musset, Sand, Lamb, Hogg, Fremy, Soulie, Janin (Comparative Literature, 2)

A fascinating analysis of major works of European Romanticism entitled “confessions.” The Romantic Art of Confession is about works specifically entitled ‘confessions’ written during the Romantic period in Britain and France: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Alfred de Musset’s Confession d’un enfant du siecle, and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinnerare among the works studied. Professor Levin argues that such works share a number of characteristics: they appropriate a religious form, they have narrators (confessors) who are outcasts and with whom the authors identify, and they focus on specific problems — opium addiction, alcoholism, illegitimacy — that suggest broader issues.Each of the book’s chapters considers a confessional work as representative of the concerns of autobiographical discourse in general and of the form of the Romantic confession in particular, drawing on the procedures of post-structural critics and upon the psychological and feminist theories of Lacan and Chodorow.