Overview
- Uses previously-underutilised archives to show that during the Romantic period, authorship operated principally as a relatively restricted social system, rather than a profession or mode of artistic practice
- Discusses the careers of a diverse range of writers, including Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, Felicia Hemans, Robert Heron, Eliza Parsons, Robert Bloomfield, Hannah More, Walter Scott and Lord Byron
- Establishes the crucial mediating roles played by larger assemblages, including the publishing industry; political coteries; privileged families; regional, national and global networks; and periodical culture
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (PERCP)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors’ interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.
Reviews
“Living as an Author in the Romantic Period seeks to explode the notion that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries oversaw a transformation of the literary economy into one in which professional authors could make a living exclusively off their writing. The author’s detailed work with neglected archives, especially publishers’ ledgers and the Royal Literary Fund papers, fuels several original claims about authorship in the romantic period. This is a book that will matter and possibly even be field-changing.” (Michael Gamer, British Academy Global Professor (QMUL) and author of Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry(2017))
“Matthew Sangster’s new book provides a compelling revision of the standard account of the advent of professional authorship in the early nineteenth century. Using remarkable archive material from publishers combined with other institutional records folded into engrossing case histories of individual writers, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period reveals that the death of patronage has been prematurely announced. Even as writing became bound up with an array of networked cultural activities in a reconstituting field of literary production, marvellously brought to life in Sangster’s study, the career of the writer as a singular occupation remained out-of-reach for most of its aspirants.” (Jon Mee, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Matthew Sangster is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Material Culture at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has published widely on Enlightenment libraries, literary institutions, Romantic metropolitanism, media culture, and the affordances of Fantasy.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Living as an Author in the Romantic Period
Authors: Matthew Sangster
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37047-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37046-6Published: 28 January 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37049-7Published: 28 January 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-37047-3Published: 27 January 2021
Series ISSN: 2634-6516
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6524
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 372
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Fiction