Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius

ISBN-13: 9781137518255 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 229 str.

Gerald Egan

Opis

It applies an innovative mix of approaches - book history, Enlightenment and twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies, and material analyses of fashions in books and in dress - to specific editions of Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron.

Recenzje

"Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century brings together disparate reading practices influenced by art history, book history, literary theory, close reading and twentieth-century philosophy, to analyse three poet-celebrities ranging from the early eighteenth century to the late Romantic period: Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron. ... This is an intriguing book that makes many convincing points about negotiating the divergent pulls of writing serious poetry and playing the fame game." (Louise Curran, The Review of English Studies, Vol. 69 (291), September, 2018)

Spis treści

1. Introduction.- 2. Freedom, Nature, and the English School of Commercial Art.- 3. The Plural Book and the Authorial Portrait.- 4. Pope's Fashionable Hand Book.- 5. Mary Robinson: Fashioning Freedom.- 6. Byron's Fashionable Abstention.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-

O autorze

Gerald Egan teaches in the English Department at California State University, Long Beach. His book, Fashioning Authorship: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius, was published in 2016.

                  

Blurb

This book examines a singular cultural formation of the long eighteenth century, the poetic genius who was also a lady or gentleman of fashion. It applies an innovative mix of approaches — book history, Enlightenment and twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies, and material analyses of fashions in books and in dress — to specific editions of Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron. In its material analyses of these books, this study looks closely at bindings, letterforms, engravings, newspaper advertisements, correspondence, and other ephemera. In its theoretical approaches, it takes up the interventions of Locke and Kant in connection with the visual theories of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds. These investigations point ultimately to a profound connection between Enlightenment formulations of subjectivity, genius, and fashion, a link that is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own cultural moment.