Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, Eds. Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840‪.‬

Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds. Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 267. $60.00 cloth. The Romantic subject is not the man we thought he was. Once so solitary, so transcendently imaginative, so gorgeously misanthropic even amidst multitudes, he has gone abroad, embraced the city and its streets, thrown himself into markets and theaters, changed his dress and his gender to become unrecognizable before our eyes. Consolidating the advances of two decades of historicist scholarship, Romantic Sociability breaks new ground in our search for this at-large subject's identities, motives, and locales. With eleven diverse and engaging essays, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite and their contributors illustrate vividly how a renewed attention to "sociability" can help us re-envision Romanticism as an historical and cultural phenomenon. As the book makes clear, sociability takes many forms, but it may be defined generally as the various kinds of "cultural work" through which individuals imagine a relation to the public world (4). Conversation, lecturing, theatergoing, shopping, and above all writing in Romantic-period Britain occurred within, and shaped, new institutional contexts for such imaginings, demanding that human beings rethink not only what they did, but who, and how, they were.