Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century

One view of the author ineighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain held that poetic genius couldreside in the lady or gentleman of fashion. Fashioning Authorship inthe Long Eighteenth Century examines this cultural trope ofgenius-as-fashionista by applying an innovative mix of approaches—bookhistory, Enlightenment and twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies,and material analyses of fashions in books and in dress—to specificeditions of Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron. In itsmaterial analyses of these books, Fashioning Authorship looks closely atbindings, letterforms, engravings, newspaper advertisements,correspondence, and other ephemera. In its theoretical approaches, ittakes up the interventions of Locke and Kant in connection with thevisual theories of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds. Theseinvestigations point ultimately to a profound connection betweenEnlightenment formulations of subjectivity, genius, and fashion, a linkthat is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own culturalmoment.