ENG 5246 Spring 2019 Eckert

Tell-all memoirs, gossip columns, fashion reporting, unauthorized biographies—these genres so central to today’s celebrity-obsessed culture have their roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This course will examine the birth of celebrity culture in the Romantic period. In the period, readers’ voracious appetite for private information about authors shaped literary production and reception. Ready work by authors including William Wordsworth, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Shelley, and especially Lord Byron—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.