Anne-Marie Millim

Victorian celebrity culture and Tennyson's circle

By 1850, Alfred Tennyson was not merely the Poet Laureate, a commercially successful and critically acclaimed author, he was one of Britains leading celebrities. Offering new analysis of the workings of Victorian celebrity, this volume explores the ever-expanding compass of Tennysons fame and the efforts of the poet and others to control this phenomenon. It shows that Tennysons retreat from mainland publicity to the secluded Isle of Wight and his limiting of his social circle to family and like-minded guests only increased the demand of fans and tourists for access to the poet. Through an analysis of poetry, paintings, photography, illustrations, memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper and periodical articles, this book shows that Tennysons fashioning of his reluctant celebrity affected not only his own life and works, but also had an effect on his celebrity and non-celebrity friends, and on the (self-)construction of his fans.

Schooling the gaze: Industry and nation-building in Luxembourgish landscape-writing, 1900–1940

This paper investigates the role of industry in the invention of a national landscape in Luxembourg between 1900 and 1940. Luxembourg is a significant case study when it comes to the construction of national identity, because it did not gain its independence (1890) through revolution but was attributed the status of nationhood by the decision of the major European political powers. The period under investigation is also characterized by immense industrial expansion: in the course of a few decades, Luxembourg moved from being a rural state to being a major economic power. Focusing on landscape-writing addressed to a native audience, this paper examines the nexus of the economy, the arts and politics, arguing that writers integrated representations of industrial processes into the discourse of national identity in order to assert Luxembourg’s competence and ‘right to life’.

Signifying the small nation: the role of tourists in Luxembourgish national identity, 1913–1940

ABSTRACT This article explores the meaning of the tourist presence in the discursive construction of Luxembourg as a nation during the first part of the twentieth century. The Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, a small territory surrounded by the major European powers France, Belgium and Germany, gained independence in the nineteenth century. The attribution of sovereignty made the invention of the nation imperative and landscape writing became instrumental in developing the ideological rootedness essential to the construction of national identity. Batty Weber (1860–1940), the most prolific contemporary writer, actively sought to shape the image of the independent Luxembourg both on a national and international level, drawing on the tourist industry as a means of acquiring national self-knowledge and self-respect. His assessments and suggestions for improvement regarding the practicalities of the tourist experience are of vital importance as they illustrate the process of creating places for foreign visitors and local residents alike. He further posited the imagined gaze of the tourist as the gaze the locals should adopt and advocated the ‘spatial practices’ (De Certeau) of visitors to be emulated in the enactment of nationhood.

Celestial landscapes: the supranational imagination in Luxembourg's pre-World War I press

This study examines the metaphorical means through which political independence was translated into national identity in Luxembourgish literature between 1900 and 1940. It shows how industrialisation provided an aesthetic canvas for literary modernism and how the writer and journalist Batty Weber and his contemporaries sought to modernise a dominant ideological attachment to the soil by instituting the sky as the embodiment of ideational change. While, for them, the smoky industrial skies symbolised democratic interactions between societies, celestial landscapes also met other ideological purposes in the contemporary Luxembourgish literary imagination, serving as a useful metaphor for spatial and intellectual development.