Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: Robert Southey and the Problem of Literary Biography

Robert Southey also wrote, translated or edited eleven major works related to the history and culture of Spain, Spanish America, Portugal and Brazil in the 1810s and 1820s, including the first history of Brazil available in English. This remarkable literary production, along with Southey's position as one of the major writers for the conservative Quarterly Review, makes him the pre-eminent British writer on Luso-Hispanic subjects in the first half of the 19th century. His personal library held 30,000 volumes and he was a widely-consulted expert on Luso-Hispanic culture and political affairs; government officials, historians and literary critics from the United States, Great Britain and Europe all regularly sought his advice and specific information for their own purposes. In this way, there was a direct connection between Southey's work and the image of the predominantly Catholic, Luso-Hispanic World that affected public policy and shaped private attitudes in the English-speaking world. Karen Racine will discuss her biography of Southey, focusing the promise and pitfalls of using a single person as a lens through which to refract the ideals of a complicated age.