Bright Stars
John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
The most celebrated poet of his day after Byron, Barry Cornwall, pseudonymous identity of Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), was a solicitor, dandy, and pugilist championed by Leigh Hunt, as well as the author of three books of heralded verse. This volume attempts to square Cornwall’s early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect, emphatically returning an important and unjustly neglected Romantic author to critical focus, and exploring the fascinating mirror between this own trajectory into celebrity with that of his now better-known contemporary, John Keats.
Acknowledgements
Note on Sources
Preface
Introduction: Bubbles or Gold on the Bounteous Tree? Cornwall’s Celebrity
1 ‘Breathing Human Passion’: Cornwall and Popular Romanticism
2 ‘Slippery Steps of the Temple of Fame’: Cornwall and Keats’s Reputation
3 Bright Stars and Close Bosom-Friends: Keats, Cornwall and ‘Cockney’ Politics
4 The Scent of Strong-Smelling Phrases: Cornwall’s Popular Eroticism
5 Metropolitan Commissioners of Lunacy
Afterword—Afterlives
Selected Bibliography
Index
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
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