In nineteenth century England, some poets—Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example—became hugely famous. Other poets, such as Percy Shelley, had groups of intensely devoted fans who made their personal lives the topic of widespread fascination and gossip. Eisner's Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity analyzes the ways poets and their readers adjusted to the new modes of fame and fandom that appeared along with the rise of mass media, a mass audience for literature, and new techniques of marketing and journalism in the nineteenth century.
While critical treatments of the period often characterize the era’s most artistically ambitious poets as preferring a lasting future fame to contemporary popularity, Eisner shows that a sophisticated and strategic engagement with the culture of celebrity was central to the way such poets as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landon and Barrett Browning experimented with literary form. Eisner continues to work on Romantic-era reading practices: he’s editing a set of essays on “Romantic Fandom” for the prestigious electronic Romantic Circles Praxis series, due out in early 2010. He’s beginning a new book project, Reading Communities in British Romanticism, that juxtaposes contemporary theories of reading and form with Romantic-era thinking about these issues.