Byron’s Romantic Celebrity

Byron’s Romantic Celebrity offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. Under that rubric, it investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, the material conditions of Byron’s publications, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

TOM MOLE is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University, Canada. He is the editor of a volume of Blackwood’s Magazine 1817-1825 (2006) and has published articles in Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Byron Journal and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

List of Figures and Tables * Preface * Acknowledgements * Abbreviated Titles * Romantic Celebrity * ‘An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill’: The Embarrassment of Industrial Culture * Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Beginning the Hermeneutic of Intimacy * Scopophilia and Somatic Inscription in Byron’s Verse Tales * The Visual Discourse of Byron’s Celebrity * The Handling of Hebrew Melodies * Childe Harold Canto Three: Rewriting Reading * Don Juan: Celebrity and the Subject of Modernity * Envoi * Bibliography * Index