Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry

Abstract

This is the first book to examine how Romantic writers transformed poetic collections to reach new audiences. In a series of case studies, Michael Gamer shows Romantic poets to be fundamentally social authors: working closely with booksellers, intimately involved in literary production, and resolutely concerned with current readers even as they presented themselves as disinterested artists writing for posterity. Exploding the myth of Romantic poets as naive, unworldly, or unconcerned with the practical aspects of literary production, this study shows them instead to be engaged with intellectual property, profit and loss, and the power of reprinting to reshape literary reputation. Gamer offers a fresh perspective on how we think about poetic revision, placing it between aesthetic and economic registers and foregrounding the centrality of poetic collections rather than individual poems to the construction of literary careers.

‘The first impression, you, yourself, will buy’: The Gunninghiad, Virginius and Virginia and the Art of Scandal at the Minerva Press

“…Playing with what Michael Gamer identifies as 'the relation between self-commodification and self-canonization', Gunning's work with Lane traded on the notorious affairs of her life in an attempt to capitalise on the trauma and simultaneously install herself in the English literary tradition. 45 In addition to this back-page advertisement in V&V, Lane promoted the Anecdotes no less than a dozen times in The Star and Evening Advertiser. This series of advertisements, which Blakey suggests probably comprised more ads fig.…”

Radcliffe Incorporated: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Ann Radcliffe and the Minerva Author

“…The commercial and historical repackaging of these Minerva novels in catalogues and subsequent editions has much to tell us about the construction of literary history and Radcliffe's place within it, particularly if, as Michael Gamer has recently claimed, 'when writers and publishers begin assessing how given works might be better presented in altered garb or with a revised set of claims […] literary history begins'. 6 In literary historical terms, Radzivil and Velina de Guidova suggest a curious prehistory for both Radcliffes. Although Ann Radcliffe's first two novels had been published anonymously by 1790, neither she nor Mary Ann Radcliffe had yet published anything under their own names.…”