The Limits of Familiarity
Authorship and Romantic Readers
Seiten
2022
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-391-4 (ISBN)
Bucknell University Press,U.S. (Verlag)
978-1-68448-391-4 (ISBN)
The Limits of Familiarity analyzes the intensely personal feelings that Romantic-era readers came to have for authors. Contributing to reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history, this book reveals how anxieties about the cultural value of familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship.
What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.
What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.
LINDSEY ECKERT is an assistant professor of English at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where her research and teaching focus on Romanticism and the history of text technologies.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Familiarity’s “ due bounds”
1. Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and the Problems of Reading Familiarity
2. “Though a stranger to you”: Byron’s Poetics of Familiarity and Readerly Attachment
3. Lady Caroline Lamb’s Female Follies and the Dangers of Familiarity
4. “the whole cursed story”: William Hazlitt’s Familiar Style
5. Mediating a Manuscript Ethos: Familiarity in Albums and Literary Annuals
Coda: Lifting “the film of familiarity”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 01.07.2022 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 |
| Zusatzinfo | 6 b&w images, 3 color images |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 156 x 235 mm |
| Gewicht | 4 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-68448-391-3 / 1684483913 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-68448-391-4 / 9781684483914 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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