Sharon Marcus

The profession of the author: abstraction, advertising, and Jane Eyre

Through the concept of abstraction I examine the relation between female subjectivity and writing in Jane Eyre. In the novel abstraction means a lack of attention or a lapse of will, conditions tha...

Celebrity 2.0: The Case of Marina Abramović

How have social media changed celebrity and fandom? Using the case study of Marina Abramovic, whose 2010 live performance at the Museum of Modern Art catapulted her into celebrity, “Celebrity 2.0” presents four theses about celebrity in order to identify which features of modern celebrity have remained fairly constant for over a century and which have been significantly altered by the advent of digital media.

Celebrity, Past and Present

In the 1920s, gossip columnist Walter Winchell catered to a formidable public appetite for celebrity news, reaching about 50 million Americans via his weekly radio show and daily newspaper column. Winchell relished the power his column gave him: “Democracy is where everybody can kick everybody else’s ass…. But you can’t kick Winchell’s” (Gabler 1994: xiii). Precisely because public opinion had become such a formidable political force, the autocratic few who shaped it were cushioned from its blows.

Introduction World Literature and Global Performance

The six theatre scholars who have contributed to this special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film seek to account for the global scale of nineteenthcentury performance by establishing transnational frameworks for theatre studies, a field still often defined in terms of national traditions. For much of the long nineteenth century, performance was global and global culture depended as much on performance as on literature in print. The essays collected here demonstrate that ceaseless mobility across national borders helped to define the experience of writing for, performing in and going to the theatre throughout the nineteenth century. These essays also add a significant dimension to the burgeoning scholarly literature on global theatre by emphasising intersections between performance, print and other media and by documenting and analysing the practices of transnational adaptation and remediation across international lines that were ubiquitous in a pre-copyright age. They demonstrate that nineteenth-century theatre may have been as crucial as poetry or the novel to creating the borderless global world whose value is so often hotly debated today.

Judith R. Walkowitz

Historian Judith R. Walkowitz, interviewed by Sharon Marcus, talks about how she came to study Victorian prostitution and the evolution of London’s Soho neighborhood, her efforts to connect political engagement and scholarship, how the discipline of history has and hasn’t changed over the past forty years, the alterity of the past, and her current project on the history of feminism and urban space in 1970s and 1980s London

How to Talk about Books You Have Read

lic Books, a twicemonthly online review that I cofounded with Caitlin Zaloom in 2012. On the irst and iteenth of each month, Public Books publishes six to eight essays about books, nonprint works, the media, the arts, and ideas, written mostly by academics but also by journalists, novelists, activists, and artists. In addition to traditional reviews, we publish roundtables, interviews, visual essays, and Public Picks, our annual lists of best books and ilms. Our contributors run the gamut from graduate students to emeriti and have included Judith Butler, Nicholas Dames, Colin Dayan, Simon During, Eric Hayot, Ursula Heise, Marianne Hirsch, Caroline Levine, Heather Love, Leah Price, and Gayatri Spivak; a full list is available on the site’s “About” page. We recently added a blog, whose diverse content includes reviews of ilms, plays, and television shows; essays by the winners of undergraduate writing contests; and ongoing series such as Public Streets, devoted to urban observation, and On Our Nightstands, in which we on the editorial staf describe the books we are reading (or at least falling asleep beside).1 We are always interested in expanding our roster, so consider this an invitation to take a look at the site and to pitch us an idea if you like what you see. When I explain the motives behind the founding of Public Books and describe the kind of writing we feature, I usually say that we seek to give academics a forum for writing about contemporary culture in ways that combine rigorous ideas, strong arguments, and accessible, engaging prose. hink of it as crossing over without selling out. Our guiding editorial principle at Public Books is “scholarly value added”: we believe that all the pieces we publish should illustrate how academic knowledge enhances their authors’ takes on the works under discussion and should convey specialist knowledge to an interested general public.2 In other words, we aim to give academic writing a good name, and there are signs that we are succeeding. In 2013 he Daily Beast SHARON MARCUS is dean of humani-