Higgins, David 1974-

PERSONAL:

Born 1974. Education: University of Sussex, B.A.; University of York, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of English, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Ln., Leeds LS2 9JT, England. E-mail—d.higgins@leeds.ac.uk.

CAREER:

University of Leeds, Leeds, England, lecturer in English.

WRITINGS:

Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics, Routledge (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, edited by Kim Wheatley, Frank, Cass (London, England), 2003; and A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, edited by Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst, Blackwell Publishing (Oxford, England), 2007. Contributor to periodicals, including History Workshop Journal and Romanticism.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Higgins writes widely on the culture and literature of the Romantic period. In Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics, Higgins examines how the nineteenth-century periodical press shaped the debate about the nature of genius for a middle-class audience and constructed certain writers and artists as geniuses. "As the ‘Romantic’ idea of the author as a gifted, self-expressive creator gave way to the ‘Victorian’ idea of the author as a professional, socially useful sage, discussions of genius became increasingly strident and polarized," noted Tom Mole, on the Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840 Web site. "Accounts of the genius as a transcendent, spiritualised moral exemplar opposed accounts of the genius as entrammelled in local details, worldly concerns, and morally suspect habits." Higgins looks at the careers of such writers as William Wordsworth, Benjamin Haydon, and William Hazlitt, exploring how literary magazines contributed to their popular image. According to Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, writing in the Wordsworth Circle, the author "is alive to the nuances and often self-contradictory intricacies that informed the various periodicals on the question of genius. He also recognizes the role of the human element in the creation of a phenomenon, commenting on the ways in which the friendships, romantic attachments, and jealousies amongst and between authors and reviewers contributed to the creation of Romantic genius." Mole concluded that Higgins "has … made the case very effectively that magazines were important in shaping, mediating, and popularising Romantic conceptions of genius, and that magazine writing should hold an important place, in its own right, in scholarly debates about the history, ideology and politics of genius."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, winter, 2005, Tom Mole, review of Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics.

Times Literary Supplement, October 20, 2006, Barton Swaim, "Views of Anon," p. 27.

Wordsworth Circle, autumn, 2006, Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, review of Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine, p. 228.

ONLINE

University of Leeds,http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ (July 15, 2007), "David Higgins."