Living as an Author in the Romantic Period

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors' interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.

Uses previously-underutilised archives to show that during the Romantic period, authorship operated principally as a relatively restricted social system, rather than a profession or mode of artistic practice Discusses the careers of a diverse range of writers, including Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, Felicia Hemans, Robert Heron, Eliza Parsons, Robert Bloomfield, Hannah More, Walter Scott and Lord Byron Establishes the crucial mediating roles played by larger assemblages, including the publishing industry; political coteries; privileged families; regional, national and global networks; and periodical culture

Autorentext
Matthew Sangster is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has published widely on Enlightenment libraries, literary institutions, Romantic metropolitanism, media culture, and the affordances of Fantasy.

Klappentext

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: What was an Author in the Romantic Period?.- 2. Chapter One: Publishers, Book Production and Profits.- 3. Chapter Two: Sociable Alignments.- 4. Chapter Three: Succeeding in 'the Worst Trade'.- 5. Chapter Four: The Working Writer.- 6.Chapter Five: The Oligarchs of Literature: Authority and the Quarterly Reviews.- 7. Chapter Six: Refashioning Authorship's Purview.- 8. Coda: Print Proliferation and the Invention of the Artist