Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Gerald Egan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One view of the author in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain held that poetic genius could reside in the lady or gentleman of fashion. Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century examines this cultural trope of genius-as-fashionista by applying an innovative mix of approaches—book history, Enlightenment and twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies, and material analyses of fashions in books and in dress—to specific editions of Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron. In its material analyses of these books, Fashioning Authorship looks closely at bindings, letterforms, engravings, newspaper advertisements, correspondence, and other ephemera. In its theoretical approaches, it takes up the interventions of Locke and Kant in connection with the visual theories of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds. These investigations point ultimately to a profound connection between Enlightenment formulations of subjectivity, genius, and fashion, a link that is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own cultural moment.