Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity

While artistically ambitious poets of the era are often characterized as preferring a lasting future fame to contemporary popularity, this book reveals that a sophisticated, strategic and fascinated engagement with new modes of fame was central to the experiments with literary form of poets such as Byron, Keats, Shelley and Barrett Browning. While artistically ambitious poets of the era are often characterized as preferring a lasting future fame to contemporary popularity, this book reveals that a sophisticated, strategic and fascinated engagement with new modes of fame was central to the experiments with literary form of poets such as Byron, Keats, Shelley and Barrett Browning. Poets writing in nineteenth-century Britain participated in a burgeoning culture of literary celebrity in which readers responded to writers with powerful feelings of fascination, desire, love or horror. Though critical treatments of the period often characterize the era's most artistically ambitious poets as preferring a lasting future fame to contemporary popularity, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity reveals that a sophisticated, strategic and fascinated engagement with new modes of fame and new kinds of fandom was central to these poets' experiments with literary form. The book offers new readings of both Romantic and Victorian texts, treating Byron, Keats, Shelley, Landon and Barrett Browning. Focusing on the exchanges between writers and their passionate readers, this study links the performative operation of language in poetic practice with the array of novel cultural practices through which celebrity is created and sustained "Poets writing in nineteenth-century Britain participated in a burgeoning culture of literary celebrity in which readers responded to writers with powerful feelings of fascination, desire, love or horror. Though critical treatments of the period often characterize the era's most artistically ambitious poets as preferring a lasting future fame to contemporary popularity, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity reveals that a sophisticated, strategic and fascinated engagement with new modes of fame and new kinds of fandom was central to these poets' experiments with literary form. The book offers new readings of both Romantic and Victorian texts. treating Byron, Keats, Shelley, Landon and Barrett Browning, among others. Focusing on the exchanges between writers and their passionate readers, this study links the performative operation of language in poetic practice with the array of novel cultural practices through which celebrity is created and sustained."--BOOK JACKET Contents 6 Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 10 1 Systems of Literary Lionism 29 2 Keats, Lyric and Personality 57 3 The Cenci's Celebrity 77 4 Shelley's Glamour 100 5 " The Atmosphere of Authorship": Landon, Byron and Literary Culture 124 6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Energies of Fandom 145 Notes 163 Index 203 A 203 B 204 C 205 D 206 E 206 F 206 G 207 H 207 I 208 J 208 K 208 L 208 M 209 N 209 O 210 P 210 Q 210 R 211 S 212 T 213 U 213 V 213 W 213 Z 213