The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers

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.

Author: Lindsey Eckert
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 06/17/2022
Pages: 258
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781684483907
ISBN10: 1684483905
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | Gothic & Romance
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 18th Century

About the Author
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.