If this book achieves its promise, it would be a useful book indeed: “This is the first book to examine how Romantic writers transformed poetic collections to reach new audiences. In a series of case studies, Michael Gamer shows Romantic poets to be fundamentally social authors: working closely with booksellers, intimately involved in literary production, and resolutely concerned with current readers even as they presented themselves as disinterested artists writing for posterity.” My recent authorial re-attribution and publishing history research has demonstrated that Pope and a group of other writers are likely to have staged “literary battles” in the press deliberately to bring both sides’ collections into the public’s awareness, so it confirms this theory of canonical poets as getting there through extremely aggressive self-promotion campaigns. “Exploding the myth of Romantic poets as naive, unworldly, or unconcerned with the practical aspects of literary production, this study shows them instead to be engaged with intellectual property, profit and loss, and the power of reprinting to reshape literary reputation.” My own research has shown that many now canonized authors (especially from these earlier centuries of mainstream printing) engaged in self-publication (Defoe, Dickens, Richardson) and not only self-re-printing, but self-publishing has such a negative connotation today that Michael Gamer might have deliberately avoid exploring this part of the canonization process.
While I can dream about the evidence I would like to find in a collection on this topic, the reality of what this book offers does not begin to meet these expectations. For example: “Self-collecting and self-canonization… require presenting that life and corpus as vibrantly alive and resonating with the social structures that constitute the nation” (51). Self-canonization means adding yourself to the canon through possibly puffing yourself in anonymous reviews, or otherwise releasing collections that include your own work in a canonical context. What does this act of literary self-propagating sabotage have to do with showing life as representing society? Showing life really has nothing to do with collecting or canonization, but is the basic element all fiction and non-fiction has in common. Gamer could not have been more general and nonsensical than he is being in these sentences.
The chapter on Southey’s “Laureate Policy” at least touches on the subject it promises to cover in the conclusion: “The disappearance of ‘Poet Laureate’ from the title page of the Poetical Works attests… that, after nearly a quarter-century, the office had so depreciated in value so as not to be worth claiming” (196). Gamer is approaching a point here about purchasing titles such as “Poet Laureate” in order to bolster a literary career as a strategy that has been employed across the history of highbrow literature, but he stops short of stressing this point in the last sentences of this chapter, instead digressing into how much the office failed to be worth to Southey’s heirs after his death, and what Southey wrote about his looming death and inheritance in general. It seems as if it is no longer “cool” to conclude chapters in modern academic publishing. Why explain what the point of all that evidence was? Why offer your take on the findings? Once an author reaches the needed word-count, it is time to stop abruptly at the end of a long quote, not even connecting what this bit of “wisdom” has to do with the rest of it…