Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry

Michael Gamer explodes the myth of the unworldly Romantic poet, showing writers' interest in public presence, and profit and loss.

Michael Gamer (Author)

9781316611531, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

330 pages
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'… the ultimate quality of Gamer's study resides in the acuity of its close readings, and in its attentiveness to a novel range of authors.' Andrew Raven, British Society for Literature and Science Reviews (bsls.ac.uk)

This is the first book to examine how Romantic writers transformed poetic collections to reach new audiences. In a series of case studies, Michael Gamer shows Romantic poets to be fundamentally social authors: working closely with booksellers, intimately involved in literary production, and resolutely concerned with current readers even as they presented themselves as disinterested artists writing for posterity. Exploding the myth of Romantic poets as naive, unworldly, or unconcerned with the practical aspects of literary production, this study shows them instead to be engaged with intellectual property, profit and loss, and the power of reprinting to reshape literary reputation. Gamer offers a fresh perspective on how we think about poetic revision, placing it between aesthetic and economic registers and foregrounding the centrality of poetic collections rather than individual poems to the construction of literary careers.

Introduction: re-collections intranquility
1. Corpus, canon, and the self-collected author
2. Subscription reprinting: the third and fifth Elegiac Sonnets
3. 'Bell's poetics': from The Florence Miscellany to the books of The World
4. 'A local habitation and a name': remaking Lyrical Ballads
5. Robert Southey's laureate policy
6. Shelley incinerated: the heart of The Posthumous Poems.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]