One view of the author in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain held that poetic genius could reside in the lady or gentleman of fashion. Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century examines this cultural trope of genius-as-fashionista by applying 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, Fashioning Authorship 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 linkthat is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own cultural moment.
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.-
"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)
