Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy in Print, 1780-1821 [Hardcover]

This text?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.Introduction PART I: WANDERING ROYALS? Instituting Prodigality: The Political Meaning of a Wayward Son The King's Madness and the Crisis of Representation PART II: READING THE BODY POLITIC: PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND THE UNRULY QUEEN Managing Propriety for the Regency: Jane Austen Reads the Book Body Doubles: Intertextuality and Sexuality in the New Monarchy

Throughout Royal Romances, Samuelian makes excellent connections between literary texts, representations from the popular press, and the crises in the royal family. She reveals a conflict-filled series of adjustments as the press, the public, and the royals themselves contended with 'the public privacy of monarchy' (178). At the end of this engrossing study, Samuelian also hints persuasively that she has revealed something more: the representational processes, conflicts, and strategies inherited by the kings, queens, and public who followed the Georges. - Michael Wiley, The Wordsworth Circle

'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 replă