Byromania: Romantic Literary Celebrity (ENGL40018)

This subject examines celebrity as a new form of literary fame that emerges in the Romantic period. Focussing on the mad, bad and dangerous fame of Lord Byron, George Gordon, it engages “Byromania” as an exemplary form of celebrity as a new culture of productive reception. With the rapid expansion of literary markets from the late eighteenth century, literary works were no longer produced for a small audience of readers often known to the author, but across a distance for a vast, anonymous body known as the reading public. A radically altered relationship between writers and readers thereby created the conditions for the culture and economy of literary celebrity, which overcame this distance by forging new reading practices that established an intimacy between author and public. This subject explores these changing relations. Through a study of the scandalous celebrity of Byron and his contemporaries, and of the afterlives of Byronic celebrity, students will develop an understanding of how the author became not only the producer of a work but the owner of a personality, turned into a commodity and produced for public consumption, identification, imitation and even ritual humiliation. Against a background of theoretical readings on celebrity, publicity and authorship, students will examine the culture of literary celebrity across a range of genres, including lyric poetry, scandalous memoir, silverfork novel, roman à clef, satire and periodical reviews.