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 si+cle, 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.

Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, Susan M. Levin is the author of Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism and of numerous articles in the fields of Romanticism and Women's Studies. She is also the performer of 'Songs by Women Composers, 1650-1998'