Seductive writers, curious readers: Literary celebrity in British Romantic poetry (Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

The literary field is transformed in the Romantic period by a culture of literary celebrity involving new kinds of authorial charisma, systematic techniques for the marketing of personalities, aggressive journalistic retailing of gossip about authors, and such developing material practices as relic collecting and cultural tourism. The author's personality and the phantasm of the author's body attract intense affective responses on the part of readers, including curiosity, desire, horror, and love. Such readerly feeling, often associated with degraded market structures and the female consumer, can also function as the sign of cultural privilege, marking the reader's participation in an elite, intimate circle of the author's admirers. The dissertation describes literary celebrity not as simply one version of authorship, but rather as a form of the relationship between writers and readers. Considered this way, celebrity designates problems of reception that are at once formal and historical: the self-alienation of authorial subjectivity, and the ambiguous interplay of aesthetic response and consumer demand in readerly desire. Celebrity turns out to fascinate not just such wildly popular or notorious writers as Byron and Mary Robinson, but also such writers as Keats and Shelley, who famously claim to refuse a suspect contemporary popularity.; The dissertation concentrates on case studies of works by Byron, Shelley, Keats and Barrett Browning, examining how these works combine a sophisticated reflection on personality's mass-market appeal with a strategic appropriation of such celebrity effects. The dissertation shows that the seductive intimacy of the lyric voice and the circulation of mass-market “personality” are not at opposite poles of Romantic literary production and reception, as critical histories of the period tend to assume. As Romantic poets recognize, both lyric intimacy and mass-market personality depend on a relation between writer and reader that is simultaneously affective and rhetorical, a relation mediated in each case by impersonal linguistic, literary and market systems. The configurations of readerly desire these poets help create have a continued resonance in responses to their poetics in the later nineteenth century and a usually unacknowledged presence in contemporary critical discourse about Romanticism.