This book explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. It traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print, grappling with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.
Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. Through examination of the practices and texts of literary families, the book traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print; that reflects a struggle in Romantic self-identity between communities of feeling and individual genius; and that grapples with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.
A thorough rethinking of a field deserves to take a shape that is in itself new. Interacting with Print delivers on this premise, reworking the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book will introduce new energy to the field of print studies and lead to considerable new avenues of investigation.
The first examination of interconnected manuscript-exchanging coteries as an integral element of literary culture in eighteenth-century Britain. This title is also available as Open Access.
The eighteenth century has generally been understood as the Age of Print, when the new medium revolutionized the literary world and rendered manuscript culture obsolete. After Print, however, reveals that the story isn’t so simple. Manuscript remained a vital, effective, and even preferred forum for professional and amateur authors working across fields such as literature, science, politics, religion, and business through the Romantic period. The contributors to this book offer a survey of the manuscript culture of the time, discussing handwritten culinary recipes, the poetry of John Keats, Benjamin Franklin’s letters about his electrical experiments, and more. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that what has often been seen as the amateur, feminine, and aristocratic world of handwritten exchange thrived despite the spread of the printed word. In so doing, they undermine the standard print-manuscript binary and advocate for a critical stance that better understands the important relationship between the media. Bringing together work from literary scholars, librarians, and digital humanists, the diverse essays in After Print offer a new model for archival research, pulling from an exciting variety of fields to demonstrate that manuscript culture did not die out but, rather, may have been revitalized by the advent of printing. Contributors: Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University * Margaret J. M. Ezell, Texas A&M University * Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University * Kathryn R. King, University of Montevallo * Michelle Levy, Simon Fraser University * Marissa Nicosia, Penn State Abington * Philip S. Palmer, Morgan Library and Museum * Colin T. Ramsey, Appalachian State University * Brian Rejack, Illinois State University * Beth Fowkes Tobin, University of Georgia * Andrew O. Winckles, Adrian College
The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of the literary family: a collaborative kinship network of family and friends that, by the end of the century, displayed characteristics of a nascent corporation. This book examines different models of collaboration within English literary families during the period 1760-1820. Beginning with the sibling model of Anna Barbauld and John Aikin, and concluding with the intergenerational model presented by the Godwins and the Shelleys, this study traces the conflict and cooperation that developed within and among literary families as they sought to leave their legacies on the English world of letters.
Andrew O. Winckles is Assistant Professor of CORE Curriculum (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Adrian College. Angela Rehbein is Associate Professor of English at West Liberty University.
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.
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources to demonstrate women's innovative approach to self-representation. It examines canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, amongst others.
