Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers

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 for Romantic-era readers. Confessional poetry, romans A clef, personal essays, gossip columns, and more gave readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But how close was too close? 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 argues that these questions influenced literary production in the Romantic period. Uniting 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 line between telling all and telling all too much.