The Limits of Familiarity

Authorship and Romantic Readers

Lindsey Eckert

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781684483907, 9781684483914
• eBook ISBN: 9781684483921
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the British Association of Romantic Studies First Book Prize 

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Familiarity’s “due bounds”
• 1. Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and the Problems of Reading Familiarity
• 2. “Though a stranger to you”: Byron’s Poetics of Familiarity and Readerly Attachment
• 3. Lady Caroline Lamb’s Female Follies and the Dangers of Familiarity
• 4. “the whole cursed story”: William Hazlitt’s Familiar Style
• 5. Mediating a Manuscript Ethos: Familiarity in Albums and Literary Annuals
• Coda: Lifting “the film of familiarity”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author