Those Who Write for Immortality
Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or . . . might there be other reasons that account for an author’s literary fate?
This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. H. J. Jackson wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period—some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn’t tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself?
Jackson offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain’s most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers’ conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this revelatory and delightful study, University of Toronto professor emerita Jackson (Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia) explores why a handful of authors from the Romantic period (Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, and Blake) achieved lasting fame while well-known contemporaries of theirs (including Robert Southey, Mary Brunton, Leigh Hunt, and Robert Bloomfield) did not. To set the stage, Jackson reviews classic texts by Cicero, Horace, Samuel Johnson, and others for the most influential ideas about fame in ancient times and in the generation preceding the Romantics. She also highlights the potentially fleeting nature of popularity; the question of merit and the relatively small role it plays in the process of recognition; and the mechanisms for making a previously unknown author's reputation, using William Blake, nearly unknown in his own time, as a test case. Jackson persuasively shows that the legacies of even the most gifted authors rest on factors largely extraneous to the actual works, including later advocacy, being suitable for multiple audiences, symbolic value, and being selected for biographies, anthologies, and translations. In this reading, Keats, for instance, ultimately outstripped his rivals in part by dying young. Thoroughly researched, dense, and judicious, Jackson's study should renew interest in the Romantic period and its writers the famous and forgotten alike.