Description
Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain.
Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.
Table of Contents
Introduction Chapter 1: The Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century British Print Market, the Author, and Romantic Hermeneutics Chapter 2: Books and the Man I Sing: Alexander Pope, Print Culture, and Authorical Self-Making Chapter 3: Thomas Gray and the Elegy : Ambivalent Authorship and Uncertain Self Chapter 4: James Beattie's Minstrel and the Displace Authorial Self Chapter 5: William Cowper: The Accidental Poet and the Emerging Self Chapter 6: The Mariner as Author and the Wedding Guest as Reader: The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere as a Dramatization of Print Circulation and the Construction of Authorial Identity Chapter 7: Wordsworth's Epitaphic Poetics, Authorial Self-Representation, and the Print Market Chapter 8: Wordsworth and the Authorial Self
