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: reception
Jennifer Harris and Hilary Iris Lowe, eds. From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors
Jennifer Harris and Hilary Iris Lowe, eds. From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors. Amherst…
Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, eds. Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience
Paul Raphael Rooney and Anna Gasperini, eds. Media and Print Culture Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Victorian Reading Experience. London:…
Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will
Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will Morgan Library and Museum, New York City 9 September 2016–2 January, 2017 “I am no…
James Procter and Bethan Benwell. Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference
James Procter and Bethan Benwell. Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference. New York: Palgrave, 2015….