Overview

"In this ambitious cross-disciplinary study, Elizabeth A. Fay examines the Romantic era in Britain as a transitional period leading to the modernist focus on identity formation and legibility. Inventing the term ""portraitive mode"" to describe a diversity of cultural and material expressions of identity, such as visual and verbal portraits, miniatures, poetry, caricatures, and biographical dictionaries, she examines a widespread cultural shift toward a world of faces and figures that foreshadows today's increasingly common self-reflections and depictions. Fay places portraiture within broader cultural currents, such as fashion and consumption, the rise of celebrity culture, personal collections and house museums, and travel literature. Synthesizing a vast array of material and tying together diverse artistic, literary, and cultural modes, she sheds new light on the historical significance of portraits and the centrality of Romantic portraiture as a vehicle for expression and subjective exploration."

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9781584657781

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Reviews

Fay's book, in which solid scholarship is very well organized and elegantly presented, is incontestably successful in analyzing the notion of congruence in eighteenth-century material culture. Her research is splendidly documented, and her grasp of the complexities of contexts firm. Perhaps the most commendable aspects of Fay's ambitious and sophisticated study is her original synthesis (she uses an impressive variety of sources and is fluent in several discourses), the extraordinary diversity of portraitive practices she considers, and her ability to remain focused on the concept of congruence (in the same way she remained focused on the 'collaborative model' developed in her study on Wordsworth) in order to complicate, indeed reconfigure, our understanding of identity construction in the eighteenth-century commodified culture. Fay's powerful and scrupulous analysis also places her name in the company of influential scholars devoted to complicating the gendered divisions of private a

Fay s book, in which solid scholarship is very well organized and elegantly presented, is incontestably successful in analyzing the notion of congruence in eighteenth-century material culture. Her research is splendidly documented, and her grasp of the complexities of contexts firm. Perhaps the most commendable aspects of Fay s ambitious and sophisticated study is her original synthesis (she uses an impressive variety of sources and is fluent in several discourses), the extraordinary diversity of portraitive practices she considers, and her ability to remain focused on the concept of congruence (in the same way she remained focused on the collaborative model developed in her study on Wordsworth) in order to complicate, indeed reconfigure, our understanding of identity construction in the eighteenth-century commodified culture. Fay s powerful and scrupulous analysis also places her name in the company of influential scholars devoted to complicating the gendered divisions of private and public, such as Paula McDowell, Amanda Vickery, Lawrence Klein, Judith Pascoe, and others. Written with an admirable sensitivity to complicated cultural nuances, Fay s book undoubtedly represents a timely and valuable contribution to the always intriguing field of eighteenth-century studies. <i><b>The Journal of British Studies</b></i>

Fay's book, in which solid scholarship is very well organized and elegantly presented, is incontestably successful in analyzing the notion of congruence in eighteenth-century material culture. Her research is splendidly documented, and her grasp of the complexities of contexts firm. Perhaps the most commendable aspects of Fay's ambitious and sophisticated study is her original synthesis (she uses an impressive variety of sources and is fluent in several discourses), the extraordinary diversity of portraitive practices she considers, and her ability to remain focused on the concept of congruence (in the same way she remained focused on the 'collaborative model' developed in her study on Wordsworth) in order to complicate, indeed reconfigure, our understanding of identity construction in the eighteenth-century commodified culture. Fay's powerful and scrupulous analysis also places her name in the company of influential scholars devoted to complicating the gendered divisions of private and public, such as Paula McDowell, Amanda Vickery, Lawrence Klein, Judith Pascoe, and others. Written with an admirable sensitivity to complicated cultural nuances, Fay's book undoubtedly represents a timely and valuable contribution to the always intriguing field of eighteenth-century studies. --The Journal of British Studies

Author Information

ELIZABETH FAY is professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has published several books, including Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal and A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism.

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