《Royal Romances》: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy in Print

Kristin Flieger Samuelian - Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy in Print, 1780-1821 [2010]

Book Title: Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy in Print, 1780-1821 (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Book Author: Kristin Flieger Samuelian

Series: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters

Hardcover: 264 pages

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (November 15, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0230616305

ISBN-13: 978-0230616301

Book Description

Royal Romances explores the reception of the royal family during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its representation in fiction, poetry, and the popular press. Samuelian finds that popular response to the royal family has reflected the public’s belief in their right of access to the private life of royalty, and in their license to understand and interpret it through representation.

Reviews

“Samuelian’s elegantly-structured study examines topics of perpetual public fascination, namely, royalty, madness, and sex, around the time of the Queen Caroline affair. The romances of princes and princess may be the stock material of fairy tales, but in what is now known (ironically enough in this case) as the Romantic era, living happily ever after proves to be located in the realm of the imagination rather than in the scandalous lives of an actual royal family . . . Anyone interested in Romantic-era print culture and the rise of the novel will enjoy the clear narrative and expertly-researched details of this book, while royalty-watchers may find intriguing parallels with the representation of monarchy and its public and private behavior today.”--Clare A. Simmons, The Ohio State University

“In this impressively lucid and well-argued book, Samuelian draws on a wide range of sources—poetry, pamphlets, prints, and both canonical and popular fiction—to illuminate crucial shifts in the representations and meanings of monarchy during the reigns of George III and George IV . . . With an unerring eye for verbal and visual detail, a striking command of the historical context, and a nuanced approach to questions of representation, Samuelian makes the history of the monarchy central to Romantic-era textual and sexual politics in this fascinating analysis.”--Mary Jean Corbett, John W. Steube Professor of English and Affiliate of Women’s Studies, Miami University 

“Royal Romances offers a witty and eye-opening account of representations of royalty in the context of emerging celebrity culture. Samuelian lingers fascinatingly over how the private lives of the era’s disreputable royals–the Prince Regent and his estranged wife Caroline–turned into a spectacle for public consumption.”--Kim Wheatley, Associate Professor of English, College of William and Mary

About the Author

Kristin Flieger Samuelian teaches in the English Department and Honors College at George Mason University. She has published essays on Austen, Dickens, and the romantic periodicals, and is the editor of the Broadview Literary Texts edition of Austen’s Emma.