Professor Mayer’s book is an insightful, eye-opening exploration of the emergence of a new type of literary celebrity at the beginning of the nineteenth century based on close readings of Walter Scott’s correspondence. Considered by Byron himself as “the first man of his time,” Scott is an ideal case study due to the immense popularity he enjoyed during his lifetime as a result of his poetic and novelistic output, especially the Waverley cycle. Beautifully contextualized through comparisons with predecessors such as Pope and Johnson, contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Southey, and Byron, and successors such as Dickens, Hardy, and Hemingway, this study sheds considerable light on the evolution of literary celebrity in general and on the brand of celebrity that Walter Scott embodied in the public consciousness of his time in particular.
Tag: epistolary culture
Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America
Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 240p., ill. ISBN 9781625342225….
James J. Connolly, Patrick Collier, Frank Felsenstein, Kenneth R. Hall, and Robert G. Hall, eds. Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis
James J. Connolly, Patrick Collier, Frank Felsenstein, Kenneth R. Hall, and Robert G. Hall, eds. Print Culture Histories Beyond the…
James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds. Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain
James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds. Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2016. x., 336p….
Vanessa Guignery, ed. Crossed Correspondences: Writers as Readers and Critics of their Peers
Vanessa Guignery, ed. Crossed Correspondences: Writers as Readers and Critics of their Peers. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016….