Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius by Gerald Egan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius by Gerald Egan Timothy P. Campbell (bio) Gerald Egan. Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xvii+ 229. 37 illus. $90. Gerald Egan’s Fashioning Authorship relates what might seem a familiar story of poetic vision entangled with the grubby detail of the printed book and the exigencies of the literary marketplace. Yet what more typically appears as a scene of authorial distraction or compromise becomes for Egan something more like a dialectical drama of the ideal—a luxuriously bookish, fashionable staging ground for a peculiarly English (and presciently Kantian) aesthetic “genius.” Centering on Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, and Lord Byron, Egan grounds these poets’ literary authority in the wider story of a “commercial school of art” in Britain (defined by the aesthetic theory of the artists Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds) where, most essentially, “idealization proceeds through fashionable particulars” (41). The “commercial school” most directly echoes in authorial portrait frontispieces that grow prominent in the age’s poetic volumes, which present a vision of transcendence achieved not despite but by means of fashion (and an allied “ magnif[ication of] the accidental and particular” by these poets’ “distinctive physicality”) as the ephemeral ground from which genius takes flight (4–5). Egan’s star, perhaps, is Pope—particularly in the outsized portrait-à-la-mode contained in the quarto volumes of his Works of 1717 (so large it had to be folded twice to fit, under the painstaking printshop supervision of the poet himself). In the printed book, Pope’s aphoristic elision of “fine Genius” with “fine fashion” (in each case, “all those are displeas’d … who are not able to follow”) finds a material-ideal correlate, enfolding “the timeless truths of high art” in a hand-held, stylishly urbane “luxury object” (1–2). The careers of Pope, Robinson, and Byron oscillate between embrace and rejection of fashion, but all consistently define their genius in relation to the same phenomenon, shaping the period’s broader articulation of autonomous subjectivity itself. Following an introduction, Egan’s second chapter provides a historical and conceptual architecture via the commercial-aesthetic theory of Richardson and his successors, who together equated “creative self-consciousness” with “fashionable self-presentation” (11). Richardson’s treatise notably [End Page 627] synthesizes painters’ hands-on expertise in craft and materials with the more idealizing “stretch[ing]” of their rational minds (quoted 18), making the “observation of visible phenomena … continuous with complex mental operations” like “discernment” (15). For Hogarth, similarly, “the way to transcend nature proceeds through the particularity of nature, as with the eroticism of “anatomical detail” “minutely modified” to become the empirically-derived “little bit more” that marks the master (27) or by contemplating movement not as motion per se but as the fusion of “discrete but successive moments of perception” (29). For Reynolds, in turn, fashion’s “insubstantial” ornaments nonetheless convey “the original fabric of our minds” (quoted 31); and the painter’s “improvement” of “visible phenomena” paradoxically hews to “nature’s truth even as he improves it” (16). In a sign of the contemporaneous appreciation of the mutual “resona[nce]” of these perspectives, Reynolds’s own portrait head adorns a reissue of Richardson in the later eighteenth century (36). But Egan also explores the longer resonance of the “commercial school” for Kantian aesthetics (extending to contemporary theorists like Jean-Luc Nancy). Here, as Kant himself insisted, imagination “creat[es], as it were, another [higher] nature out of the material that actual nature gives it” (quoted 147), as poetic books artfully bridge the gap between causal world and free genius. Egan’s third chapter takes inspiration from Friedrich Schlegel’s suggestion that each individual book is fragmentary, for ultimately there is only one universal book, to consider the intrinsic “plurality of the poetic edition” in three senses: as a “material entity” shaped by bookmaking trades, as part of a social practice, and as aesthetic “intersection of materiality and ideality” (59, 61). In the poetic edition, the tensions between seeming unity and final plurality are pronounced, as poets’ “image of alienation” from the moment contrasts...