Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity - Tapa dura

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.

ERIC EISNER is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, USA, where he teaches courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, Romanticism, literary theory and cultural studies.