What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.

LINDSEY ECKERT is an assistant professor of English at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where her research and teaching focus on Romanticism and the history of text technologies.

— Andrew Franta, author of Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public

“The Limits of Familiarity draws on a wealth of source material from the prose nonfiction framework that scaffolds literary production, including private correspondence, reviews, the prefaces that frame collections of poetry, and the letters that fans of those poetry collections sent to their authors. . . . Eckert’s analysis is satisfyingly thorough, and will be valuable for anyone interested in the reception history of celebrity, media history, and the power dynamics that shape popular and literary culture.”— Prose Studies

“Required reading for anyone interested in the history of Romantic readerships, media history, or the culture of celebrity, The Limits of Familiarity makes new and productively strange the concept of the familiar for Romanticist scholarship.”— Keats-Shelley Journal

"The Limits of Familiarity uses an impressive array of archival materials and its case studies are meticulously detailed...[Eckert] shows the tenuousness of the line between familiarity and over-familiarity—the same author can be praised or pilloried, depending on the cultural mood. [I]t is a book focused on a particular historical moment. Yet its resonances ring far wider." — The Times Literary Supplement

— Eric Eisner, author of Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity

— Tom Mole, editor of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850

“. . . a complex, enticing picture of Romantic celebrity—one that expands the terrain beyond the stories we’re used to.”— Eighteenth-Century Studies