Offers the works of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), the late Romantic-era novelist most famous for her affair with Lord Byron. Presenting Lamb's works in a scholarly format, this book situates her literary achievements within the context of her Whig allegiances, her sense of noblesse oblige and her promotion of aristocratic reform.

Offers the works of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), the late Romantic-era novelist most famous for her affair with Lord Byron. Presenting Lamb's works in a scholarly format, this book situates her literary achievements within the context of her Whig allegiances, her sense of noblesse oblige and her promotion of aristocratic reform.

Offers the works of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), the late Romantic-era novelist most famous for her affair with Lord Byron. Presenting Lamb's works in a scholarly format, this book situates her literary achievements within the context of her Whig allegiances, her sense of noblesse oblige and her promotion of aristocratic reform.

Offers the works of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), the late Romantic-era novelist most famous for her affair with Lord Byron. Presenting Lamb's works in a scholarly format, this book situates her literary achievements within the context of her Whig allegiances, her sense of noblesse oblige and her promotion of aristocratic reform.

What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.

The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.