Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers

In the Romantic era, familiarity with well-known authors through confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns was both a social virtue and a danger. Eckert's book "The Limits of Familiarity" explores how anxieties about familiarity shaped literary production and authorship, encouraging us to reflect on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much in our own historical moment.

Format: Hardback
Length: 228 pages
Publication date: 17 June 2022
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

In the Romantic era, a time of confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns, readers were tantalized with tantalizing answers to questions about the lives of well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliar? 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. By bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history, Eckert reveals how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship. This book encourages readers to reflect on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much in our own fraught historical moment.

In the Romantic era, a time of confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns, readers were tantalized with tantalizing answers to questions about the lives of well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliar? 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. By bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history, Eckert reveals how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship. This book encourages readers to reflect on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much in our own fraught historical moment.

In the Romantic era, a time of confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns, readers were tantalized with tantalizing answers to questions about the lives of well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliar? 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. By bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history, Eckert reveals how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship. This book encourages readers to reflect on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much in our own fraught historical moment.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781684483914