Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy [Hardcover]

This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.List of Figures and Tables Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviated Titles Romantic Celebrity 'An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill': The Embarrassment of Industrial Culture Childe Harold's Pilgrimage : Beginning the Hermeneutic of Intimacy Scopophilia and Somatic Inscription in Byron's Verse Tales The Visual Discourse of Byron's Celebrity The Handling of Hebrew Melodies Childe Harold Canto Three: Rewriting Reading Don Juan : Celebrity and the Subject of Modernity Envoi Bibliography Index

Joint Winner of the International Byron Society's Elma Dangerfield Prize

'This superb book provides an adroit analysis of the ways that a specifically Romantic celebrity culture informs Byron's oeuvre - from the Frame Bill ode to Don Juan. Yet it does much more than that. In fact, Mole manages to recontextualize the entire concept of Romantic fame as a complex interplay between industrial print culture, historical individuals, and the readerly paradigms of the era. It is this broader lens that enables the book to shine new light on such issues as Romantic subjectivity, authorship, visual iconography, and the nineteenth-century dialectic between public and private.' - Professsor Michael Macovski, Georgetown University, USA

'This is a serious book about Byron that also sets out to address a perceived lack of a 'history of celebrity'. Unsuprisingly Mole argues that modern celebrity culture began in the Raomantic period and that Lord Byron is not only one of its earliest examples but also one of its 'most astute critics'...This is a stringent and searching book and a timely one, too.'