About This Volume
About this volume
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Eric Eisner, essays by Nicola J. Watson, Clara Tuite, Mark Schoenfield, and David A. Brewer.
Romantic-era fans collected autographs, souvenirs, portraits and relics of celebrity writers, artists, performers and athletes; pored over gossip-filled periodicals and newspaper notices; imitated celebrities' fashion statements; fantasized about becoming friends or lovers with celebrities; got caught up in "crazes" for persons and texts; created fan fiction, wrote fan mail and formed communities of like-minded devotees. Analyzing fan practices across a range of cultural contexts, the essays in this volume will explore how the concept of "fandom" can help us make sense of the role of various audiences in the cultural activity and cultural productions of the Romantic period.
About the Design and Markup
This volume was TEI-encoded by Michael Quilligan, a site manager for Romantic Circles. Laura Mandell transformed the TEI files into HTML by using modified versions of the transforms provided by the TEI. TEI renders text archival quality for better preservation and future access. This is the first RCPS volume to be so encoded.
The image associated with this volume is by cartoonist Kate Beaton, creator of the webcomic Hark! A Vagrant, and is used with her kind permission; the original sketch can be found here.
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About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and most exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Eric Eisner is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (Palgrave, 2009), and is currently working on projects on Keats and contemporary poetry and on reading communities in British Romanticism.
Nicola J. Watson is a specialist in romantic literature and culture, and author of Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790-1825 (OUP, 1994), England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (OUP, 2002), and The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Palgrave, 2006). She is the editor of two collections of essays, the first with Mary Favret, At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Material, and Feminist Criticism (IUP, 2004) and Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-century Culture (Palgrave, 2009), along with an edition of Scott's The Antiquary for Oxford World's Classics and many essays.
Clara Tuite is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and co-editor, with Gillian Russell, of Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770—1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and, with Claudia L. Johnson, of A Companion to Jane Austen (Blackwell, 2009). She is currently completing a monograph entitled "Proverbial Notorious: Lord Byron and the Rites of Scandalous Celebrity."
Mark Schoenfield is Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The "Literary Lower Empire" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet's Contract (U of Georgia P, 1996).
David A. Brewer is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, the author of The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825, and the editor of a forthcoming Broadview Edition of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and George Colman the Elder's Polly Honeycombe. He is currently working on the uses to which authorial names were put in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.
