ENL 5246 Spring 2022 Eckert

Tell-all memoirs, gossip columns, fashion reporting, unauthorized biographies, fan mail—these genres so central to today’s celebrity-obsessed culture have their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This course will examine the birth of celebrity culture in the Romantic period and the complex relationships between public and private literature that defined it. In the period, readers’ voracious appetite for private information about authors shaped literary production and reception. Reading works by authors including Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Phillis Wheatley, Lady Caroline Lamb, and especially Lord Byron (who is often recognized as the first celebrity) we will examine how Romanticism’s central texts engaged explicitly and implicitly with debates about celebrity and the boundaries between public and private life.