Recent studies of authorial celebrity often identify the phenomenon as one that originates in the early nineteenth century and coincides with the industrialization of print and other media. In this study I identify celebrity as a cultural formation that originates earlier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that is coeval with constructions of subjectivity that emerge from the empiricist theories of Locke and the transcendental deductions of Kant. In my analysis, Enlightenment philosophy has ramifications for eighteenth-century visual and print cultures such that, in specific cases, the period's new formation of subjectivity appears in the form of the authorial figure of celebrity-as-genius. I explore this formulation in contemporary collected editions of three poets: Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, and Lord Byron. These three poets share in a characteristic that sets them apart from other authors of the period, each enjoying an extensive contemporary fame (i.e., celebrity) founded both on visual and textual self-representation.

Using a methodology that draws upon an array of eighteenth-century theorists of painting (Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds), contemporary literary critics and philosophers (Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor), and approaches (book history, visual culture, bibliography, biography), I explore the material properties of specific poetic editions of these poets, considering how in their books Enlightenment subjectivity emerges in terms of a contradictory mix of fashionable contemporary celebrity with timeless genius. This dichotomy points to an antinomy running through Western thought, the conflict between perceptual and abstract, particular and general, fashionably ornamental and classically grand. In my analysis, this antinomy---and the new Enlightenment notion of the subject itself as a rational, autonomous individual---is evident in the visual, material, and textual properties of these books as a troubled and conflicted hybrid of celebrity and genius.

Features of this dissertation include: close bibliographical analyses of early editions of the poets' books in parallel with detailed readings of frontispiece portraits and key poetic texts; examination of biographical episodes in the poets' lives in relation to material properties of their books; an afterword that considers eighteenth-century celebrity in light of current neuroscience of vision.