Byron's Romantic Celebrity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Romantic Celebrity

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 1-27

3. ‘An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’: The Embarrassment of Industrial Culture

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 28-43

4. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Beginning the Hermeneutic of Intimacy

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 44-59

5. Scopophilia and Somatic Inscription in Byron’s Verse Tales

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 60-77

6. The Visual Discourse of Byron’s Celebrity

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 78-97

7. The Handling of Hebrew Melodies

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 98-114

8. Childe Harold Canto Three: Rewriting Reading

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 115-129

9. Don Juan: Celebrity and the Subject of Modernity

   • Tom Mole

   Pages 130-153

10. Envoi

    • Tom Mole

    Pages 154-158

11. Back Matter

    Pages 159-227

    PDF

This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

• history
• ode
• Romanticism
• British and Irish Literature

Joint Winner of the International Byron Society's Elma Dangerfield Prize

'This superb book provides an adroit analysis of the ways that a specifically Romantic celebrity culture informs Byron's oeuvre - from the Frame Bill ode to Don Juan. Yet it does much more than that. In fact, Mole manages to recontextualize the entire concept of Romantic fame as a complex interplay between industrial print culture, historical individuals, and the readerly paradigms of the era. It is this broader lens that enables the book to shine new light on such issues as Romantic subjectivity, authorship, visual iconography, and the nineteenth-century dialectic between public and private.' - Professsor Michael Macovski, Georgetown University, USA

'This is a serious book about Byron that also sets out to address a perceived lack of a 'history of celebrity'. Unsuprisingly Mole argues that modern celebrity culture began in the Raomantic period and that Lord Byron is not only one of its earliest examples but also one of its 'most astute critics'...This is a stringent and searching book and a timely one, too.'

- Jane Stabler, University of St. Andrews, Byron Journal, Volume 37, Issue 1, Liverpool University Press

"One of the most stimulating books written on Romantic poetry this year"

-David Stewart, The Year's Work in English Studies

"At last Tom Mole offers a study of Byron's celebrity that focuses on his diverse and at times groundbreaking bodyof work rather than his sensational biography. Each chapter examines not only a certain aspect of Byron's fame but also one of his poems. Most of Byron's major works, as well as some less expected poems, are treated to Mole's combination of cultural-material analysis and illuminating close reading. [...] Mole's book makes a significant contribution not only to Byron scholarship, but to the study of celebrity culture more generally. [...] Mole writes with an effortless blend of accessibility and intellectual gravitas."

-Corin Throsby, Review of English Studies

"Anchored by a scrupulous attention to the historical and bibliographical contexts of Byron's poetry, the book offers [...] new ways of thinking about why Byron captured public attention so intensely. [...] Mole's study has its deepest roots in the archive of Regency print culture: each chapter is informed by meticulous bibliographical research, and often by genuine scholarly discovery. [...] The wonderful depth and tenacity of Mole's investigations [...] [is] palpable in the many fine readings and scholarly contributions in evidence throughout. [...] [A]s a multi-faceted demonstration of Byron's Romantic celebrity, it is indeed an extraordinarily valuable contribution."

-Andrew Stauffer, The Wordsworth Circle

"Byron's fame never ceases to fascinate. [...] Of all the books [...] most worth reading with regard to the idea of celebrity are Tom Mole's Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy and Claire Brock's The Feminization of Fame."

-Ann C. Colley, Studies in English Literature

"This monograph succeeds admirably in combining sensitive textual analysis, careful bibliographical research and awareness of the broader material aspects of the history of print culture."

-Caroline Franklin, BARS Bulletin and Review

"Tom Mole's study of Byron's celebrity has found a genuinely new way of approaching the poet and his work".

-Christine Kenyon Jones, Romanticism 15.1

TOM MOLE is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University, Canada. He is the editor of a volume of Blackwood's Magazine 1817-1825 (2006) and has published articles in Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Byron Journal and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

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