Rick Honings

Idolizing Authorship. Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present

Though these days, our celebrity culture tends to revolve around movie stars and pop musicians, there have been plenty of celebrity authors over the years and around the world. This volume brings together a number of contributors to look at how and why certain writers have attained celebrity throughout history. How were their images as celebrities constructed by themselves and in complicity with their fans? And how did that process and its effects differ from country to country and era to era?

Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature

This book maps the history of literary celebrity from the early nineteenth century to the present, paying special attention to the authors’ crafting of their writerly self as well as the afterlife of their public image. Case studies are John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Eliza Cook, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, J.D. Salinger and Zadie Smith.

Introduction: Starring the Author

Literary celebrity is by now a familiar feat of contemporary literary culture, but it continues to raise complex questions about the history and development of fame, the interplay between the cultural marketplace and the official culture of critics and the canon, and the relation between authorial agency and public appropriation. This Introduction addresses these questions by approaching literary celebrity as a merging of two discursive constructions: the celebrity-function and the author-function. By combining insights from celebrity studies, literary history and cultural memory studies, the Introduction conceptualizes literary celebrity as a discursive construction with several variables, such as the author’s self-presentation, the circulation of his public identity, changing opinions on literature and writership and the public afterlife of the author’s image.