General - Confessions, Orientalism

Levin - what writers achieve by titling their work a confession = appropriation of religious structures

1998 - “the power of self-creation”

WHo is St Augustine and why is he significant to the genre of confessions

AD 400 - turned the story of his religious life into an autobiography. popular text in romantic period - 7 translations appeared between 1807 and 1810

What is the significance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions

published posthumously 1782 and 1789

epic about himself - self and subjectivity. refuse the intervention of the priest as a controller of confession

starts and inspires romantic confessors on the path to ignoring God as personal identity replaces religious absolution

How does De Quincey describe Rousseau’s Confessions in the general preface to his collected works published 1856

“nothing grandly affecting but the character and the inexplicable misery of the writer”

How does Leask describe the persistent desire for the other that haunst De Quincey and Hogg

1992 - an “iatrogenic illness” - illness caused by that intended as a cure

What does Walker say exists at the root of 19th C modernity

2007 - “a basic sense of inner conflict, one that takes place between an oscillating consciousness of the old and new”

What does Walker suggest is central to the disidentity of the 19th C individual

2007 - “a clear awareness of history”