In his 1816 “An Essay on Political Tactics,” Jeremy Bentham coined the term “régime of publicity” for an entity he saw as essential for “securing the public confidence” in political institutions. This concept forms the cornerstone of Andrew Franta's illuminating book, which charts the paradigm shift that occurred in the conceptualization of the “public” during the romantic period in Britain. Franta argues that this shift saw the advent of an era, one in which mass society becomes “less an arena for the passive consumption of ideas than a kind of feedback loop which has a potentially transformative effect on the ideas it receives” (2). Ranging across the boundaries of poetry, reception theory, politics, and jurisprudence, Franta's book offers a bracing account of romanticism's engagement with the new field of “publicity” and challenges the assumption that the romantics were captives of an ideology that reacted defensively to the changing dynamics of the reception of their work.

The main thrust of Franta's argument is that commentators have underestimated the extent to which the very uncertainties that famously bred romantic anxieties about audience simultaneously “inspired the hope that poetry might achieve effects beyond what poets could envision” (18). Newly conceived as a mediating power between writer and reader, “publicity” enables the mass public to be transformed “from an obstacle into an opportunity for reimagining the nature of the poet's authority and the function of poetry itself,” a transformation persuasively linked throughout the book to discursive shifts in the cultures of political opposition, periodical reviews, and libel law (11). These changes signal a romantic turn from author to reader and from intention to effect in which “the autonomy of the poetic text reflects the poetic attempt to account for the text's reception” (15). Franta's concern with effect means that the book's method is finely poised. On one hand, by foregrounding the romantic interest in dissemination, transmission, and reception, he eschews New Historicism's preoccupation with strategies of withdrawal and displacement. On the other hand, he distances himself from recent empirical and statistical studies of authorship and readership in the period by concentrating on “the idea of the audience reflected in Romantic poetry and poetics” (13).

To his credit, Franta does not hypostatize this “idea” of publicity, but submits it to constant scrutiny and revaluation. In the opening chapter, for example, he argues that while Burke and Byron share a concern with publicity as the condition of possibility for public controversy, “for Burke, the problem of publicity is embodied in the agency of the corresponding societies; for Byron, it can be located only in the abstraction of public opinion” (39). Ambivalence toward the public, moreover, can cut across a poetic career: thus, against Jon Klancher's influential thesis that Wordsworth's ambivalence ultimately places the author in opposition to the reading audience, Franta argues that the 1815 “Essay, Supplementary” embraces “both the unpredictability of readers’ responses and the constitutive contribution of reception to the production of poetry” (71).

It is in so-called second generation writers, however, that Franta detects a genuine readiness to explore and exploit the public effects of poetry. Accordingly, while chapter 3 presents Keats as a poet who finally rejects Hunt's “coterie” model of poetic culture in order to use the medium of the periodical review as the model for a poetry that “registers the public dimension of private experience” (109), Shelley emerges—in the most cogently argued and convincing of the chapters—as a writer whose future-orientated poetics engages with the problem of a limited contemporary audience by conceiving of literature as a medium for registering rather than effecting political change.

In the penultimate chapter of the book, Franta examines the broader conditions of literary production in the period, describing how, as the meaning of printed texts began legally to be identified with effects rather than intentions, a situation arose in which “whereas the law of high treason was concerned with the intentions of a few, the law of libel was concerned with the potential effects on the many” (152). These conditions in turn mark the entry of the problem of publicity into the mainstream of discourse, so that by the 1820s, the question of poetry's “privacy” had itself become, as Franta puts it in his final chapter on Tennyson and Hemans, a “market niche” for discerning readers (165).

Although well researched and revealing, these two closing chapters are the least effectively integrated elements of Franta's study. Indeed, there are other indicators that the book's choice of material is not always best suited to Franta's purpose: Wordsworth in particular is required to multitask here as never before, filling the role of innovator in chapter 2, but popping up later in the more conventional role as foil to Shelley's radical aesthetic. Tellingly, the strongest chapters—on Keats and Shelley—address writers whose work is more obviously amenable to the way in which the book foregrounds a romantic policy of adaptive engagement with audience, but even here Franta may find it difficult to win converts to his view that by primarily addressing the problem of mediation, “Romantic politics takes the form of critique rather than statement.” In particular, scholars will take some persuading that, for Shelley, “the issue of publicity is … prior to that of politics” (17). These flaws notwithstanding, Franta makes a compelling case for considering the romantics as the inventors of the modern notion of “publicity” A fine study of a still-neglected area in romantic literature, his book should be consulted by anyone with an interest in how fundamental changes to literary production and consumption during the romantic period reshaped the relationship between writer and reader.