Introduction: re-viewing literary celebrity

What is literary celebrity, and why should people working in other areas of either literary or celebrity studies care about it? Our answer is threefold. First, as a socially urgent topic (how authors are recognised and valued in the western world), it is something of a lifeline to literary studies, which, towards the end of the twentieth century, came dangerously close to running aground on self-regarding analyses of self-regarding texts (Jameson 1991, Eagleton 2003, English 2010, Felski 2015). Alongside postcolonial and feminist studies, as well as recent trends in queer theory and ecocriticism, literary celebrity has offered a bridge to those scholars who want to think literature back into the bigger picture of society. Seminal works by, for example, Moran (2000), Glass (2004) and Jaffe (2005) set it out as a particular, historical response to the emergence of mass culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Subsequent studies have argued with various different aspects of this premise: whether this is to contest the moment and material mode of literary celebrity’s genesis (Mole 2007, 2009) or the unacknowledged gender bias underpinning the very concepts of ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ (Hammill 2007, Weber 2012). Surveying the by now substantial body of research on literary celebrity in 2014, Ohlsson et al. (2014) argued for yet greater diversification of the field of study: to include all forms of fiction, and to differentiate between literary contexts across time and in various geopolitical spaces.

This necessarily brief overview of the field brings us to the second point about literary celebrity’s significance: it is increasingly obvious that literary celebrity constitutes less a specific phenomenon within the history of literature than a necessarily multipronged methodological approach to the study of literature. Thinking about issues of reputation and writers’ relations with readers focuses the critical theorist on the innate constituents of literature: authors, readers, texts, ideas of affect, representation and self-fashioning. But it does so in such a way that also permits the study of literature to go beyond itself and to ask how ideas of literary value intersect with other predominant notions of social and economic value at any one time or place; to consider the material and pecuniary aspects of the book trade alongside the aesthetic techniques evolved in anticipation of a work’s wider appropriation; and to take seriously the demonstrable relationship between the author’s literary work and the marginalia of everyday life (as Foucault [2000, p. 207], in the case of Nietzsche’s laundry lists, implicitly does not). Looking at the ways in which authors’ lives jostle with their works, and how both their lives and works become inserted into other, non-literary discourses, requires a multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary approach to the traditional humanities discipline of reading, interpreting and classifying text. If we are to study literary celebrity in a way that goes beyond anecdotally tracing public scandals or reconstructing ironic literary play, we need to incorporate some of the more quantitative and visual-analytical research methods of book history and screen studies, as well as techniques of discourse analysis from linguistics and the social sciences – all of which have traditionally been seen by literary scholars as poor relations to textual exegesis ‘proper’.

With this we have reached our third point: if celebrity studies is built on studying, with the aid of different disciplinary expertise, how multiple agents across the media sphere manipulate different levels of intimacy (Marshall 2010, Rojek 2016), literary celebrity offers a particularly concentrated kind of case study for seeing how this happens in and through texts (Boone and Vickers 2011a). Famous authors are not only constructed as celebrities in public texts that circulate beyond their control. They also knowingly construct themselves in their own texts, and they often ‘talk back’ to the literary prize culture that has anointed them in both written and recorded forms that carry significant cultural capital (Braun 2011). Furthermore, although the dominant media of public discourse may have changed significantly over the past 100 years, there is little in the fundamental exploration of human relationships that has not already been dissected in and enacted by literary texts as they have circulated through civilisation. Leo Braudy’s Frenzy of Renown (1986) still provides celebrity studies with a foundational, if not uncontested, historical perspective on the issue of mass public recognition of individuals’ achievement. However, it is surely no accident that literary celebrity is the one area of celebrity studies that also routinely points not just back to the nineteenth century, but to even earlier times and more diverse places when considering where the phenomenon of celebrity may be found and how it may bring past and different societies to life for contemporary analysts of culture (see, for example, Boone and Vickers 2011b).

At the heart of celebrity studies in general, and literary celebrity in particular, is a desire to find new conceptual and methodological approaches to the age-old study of human relationships. Marcus (2015), Boone and Vickers (2011a), Marwick and boyd (2011a, 2011b) Marshall (2010) and Senft (2008) have considered the increasingly interactive nature of the relationships sustained by ‘new’ social media. The articles in this special issue acknowledge the new possibilities afforded by the likes of Twitter, but they also take us right back to the mass interactions that accompanied the poet Ben Jonson when he set out on a self-promotional ‘Foot Voyage’ in the early seventeenth century. Bearing this in mind, literary celebrity reminds celebrity studies to keep notions of newness and technological innovation in perspective.

So, in what follows here, we present literary celebrity as a way of seeing the relationships that are facilitated by fictional texts even as these relationships also transcend the texts. It is an interpretative lens that can be used to explore how authors relate to a wider public in the most divergent of circumstances, from the by now well-trodden contours of the early twenty-first-century Anglo-American book market (Moran 2006, Ommundsen 2007, Glass 2014) to the Russia of Lenin and Stalin and the France of Voltaire and Rousseau. In fact, literary celebrity is everywhere, if we only know how to look for it.

The guiding questions for the articles that follow are thus first and foremost ones of perspective and relationship. How do we see literary celebrity today? How does our perspective illuminate other historical moments of literary production and the way authors relate to different worlds? As Ohlsson et al. (2014) point out, from our twenty-first-century position a literary celebrity is first and foremost a person, literary theories of the ‘death of the author’ notwithstanding. However aware we are of the industry processes that grow the trappings of fame and success, the allure of celebrity is predicated on the biographical body of the writer concerned, the face that he or she can give to literary endeavour produced within a certain cultural context. As a reaction to the very means of mass circulation that underpin the rise of celebrity in the first place, people ascribe value to the sense of personal familiarity that owning a postcard picture or sharing the experience of seeing an author in the flesh at a reading event can provide (Mole 2007).

However, this value is also dependent on the wider discourse that frames any particular period. Alex Harrington, for example, shows in this issue how the body of Anna Akhmatova became the site of intense interpretative struggle between Soviet and post-Soviet intellectuals. They are emotionally and ideologically invested in the meanings they attribute to the body of Akhmatova, who goes from being a mythologised poet icon to a physically degenerate, self-promoting despot. Meanwhile, Kamilla Elliott sets out the different technologies that allowed images of famous writers to circulate throughout polite society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and reveals the social conventions surrounding the process. Elliott underscores the extent to which a wide network of people around, and including, the author manipulated these media by manipulating the bodies presented within them. So literary celebrity, just like celebrity more broadly, is always concerned with bodies, with notions of the individual and with the kinds of human relationships that can be upheld by various industrial technologies, stretching right back to early forms of print and recorded multi-media performance (on the broader contemporary context of celebrity and bodies, see Pearl and Polan [2015]).

If literary celebrity focuses first and foremost on people, it is of course also a process, and, as we have just seen, the authors would not be widely visible without the process. However, to collapse the people into the process is not helpful – literary celebrities should not be seen as merely the passive construction of interpretative forces or the market result of celebrity processes, inherently unable to look beyond or have value outside of the system that produces them. P. David Marshall’s (2010) work has already shown a move away from seeing celebrities as subordinate to the political and economic systems that sustain them, and investigated instead how new forms of media have made visible a more proactive approach on the part of celebrities. In this issue, Greg Myers looks at this phenomenon in the very contemporary context of authors’ use of Twitter. Myers takes a linguistic approach to the ‘hermeneutics of intimacy’ (Mole 2007), unpicking the language patterns that underpin social media and thereby shape relationships between authors and their readers. It is exciting to read Myers’s piece alongside that of James Loxley, who looks at real-time interaction between the author and a mass public in the very different context of Jacobean England and the different ways this interaction is then captured and reflected upon in written form.

The emphasis on how a certain image or persona is constructed and bolstered through language brings us to the third aspect of literary celebrity: along with denoting specific people and general industry processes, literary celebrity is also a product that lends itself to wider cultural appropriation. Significantly, however, the interplay between person and process remains so crucial within the concept that the kind of monumentalisation and subsequent crumbling that can quickly befall other kinds of celebrity seems less likely to happen (on the transitory nature of celebrity more broadly, see Rojek [2001]). Unlike politicians or other important public figures, authors made tangible in marble and stone just seem to be able to represent so much more than their own specific body of work, while their literary corpora remain alive to challenge and change. This observation is the upshot of Jessica Goodman’s work in this issue on the blossoming material and literary cultures for celebrating posthumous ‘great men’ in late eighteenth-century France. Where various political representatives were introduced and then ejected from the French Panthéon after its erection, the only two figures who remained resistant to the changing political tastes of revolutionary France were Voltaire and Rousseau. Their busts were seen to rise above it all as pure emanations of literary esprit.

The material culture of literary celebrity, however, also quickly brings us face to face with blind spots and absences in our society in a way that purely textual readings of authors cannot. Kamilla Elliott’s contribution to this issue engages in detail with the different imaging and paratextual conventions for the male and female writers who have gone on to form the backbone of the English-language canon: while female authors such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë were not widely identified in pictures until their (often posthumous) biographies, picture postcards of celebrated male authors circulated widely in their lifetimes – underscoring the gendering of the urban context and the circulatory practices through which literature plays a wider social role.

Studying literary celebrity, then, can quickly lead away from straightforward hagiography. Applied as an interpretative lens, it magnifies what is at stake when literature meets with wider social currents. In particular, a global view of literary relationships makes apparent the local contexts in which people, processes and products exist, and complicates notions of individual achievement. In her article in this issue, Rebecca Braun traces the collaborative nature of the networks that form around authors both within and across cultural and linguistic contexts. She asks what happens when authors who have achieved celebrity in their home territories tap into promotional structures elsewhere, and adapts Bruno Latour’s (2005) ideas of mediators and maps of social relations in order to suggest new ways of seeing the spread of fame and agency from one literary market to another. This requires moving away from some core assumptions in both literary and celebrity studies about the individual writer and the exponential growth of fame.

Literary celebrity as a way of seeing can therefore provide illumination, but it might require us to move temporarily away from what individual, well-known authors have said or done in respect of their work or person – the conscious, authorial engagement with literary celebrity that drives many studies on the subject (for example, Glass 2004, Pozorski 2012, Boyce et al. 2013, Friedman 2014) – and consider instead how their work, person and relationships exist within wider networks (Galow 2011, York 2013). This is not to underplay authors’ awareness of and complicity with certain fetishising processes, but it is to stand back and see the full range of the processes that extend beyond the author. Celebrity is about creating an environment in which celebration of a particular person can take place, using whatever self-sustaining promotional technologies are available. In the nineteenth-century literary context this environment may be a whole physical landscape that is filled with over-sized busts of authors. But it may also take the form of an online fan community who project their pleasure at finding their own experiences represented in creative works onto the unashamedly middlebrow, enthusiastically interactive author who writes entertaining, accessible fiction. In this issue, Diana Holmes demonstrates how such combined word-of-mouth and purchasing power has been able to turn contemporary French authors of averagely good fiction into a publishing phenomenon that demands a response from the literary elite.

At this point, Glass (2004) and Jaffe (2005) would argue that these authors are not really ‘literary’, and therefore their celebrity-style presence across a range of popular-culture media does not count as ‘literary celebrity’. Yet this is to determine, if not the death, then certainly the ossification of one’s subject in advance. Because it is precisely in its challenge to the established position of literature as deliberately bracketed off from the masses that the phenomenon of literary celebrity as an area of academic enquiry was born in the first place (Moran 2000, Ommundsen 2007). With each renewed challenge to the existing literary order that becomes evident in sociological trends such as the one outlined by Holmes, we can perceive a new audience suggesting new answers to the question of how literature and its various related industries (academe, publishing, film) have value in the world. These questions should give us pause for thought about our own fetishising activities as academic guardians of different ‘authors’ and the ‘worlds’ they represent. How have we picked our ‘great’ authors? Who have we excluded, and why? How do we exert authorship and comply with acts of authority-making ourselves?

The contributions to this special issue equate literary celebrity with a type of challenge in a number of ways. In the case of canonically famous authors, such as Ben Jonson, Voltaire, Boris Pasternak or Charlotte Brontë, their celebrity has become part of a normalising discourse of world literature. However, the way in which they are appropriated by other discourses and fields is always also a challenge to purely aesthetic readings of these authors’ significance. It forces us to think beyond the literary text and acknowledge that many of the ways it operates in the wider world might jar with purely literary ideals. Meanwhile, contemporary bestseller authors – like Jonathan Franzen, Amélie Nothomb, Joyce Carol Oates and Daniel Kehlmann – open up new ways of looking at literary achievement, often by pioneering interactive forms of engagement with fan bases. With these, relationships of affect spillover from the literary page onto the stage of self-promotion, but in a way that can be linked to very real pleasure and/or personal and moral instruction exchanged through immersion in books. In this sense, literary celebrity is always both at odds with the predominant literary system and an immediate product of it. It comes from the institutionalised context of literature, but it pushes it outside its comfort zone and makes the walls of greatness porous.

The perspective afforded by literary celebrity stretches time, space and the literary canon and takes us well beyond recorded dictionary usages of the term ‘celebrity’ itself. Understood as an interpretative lens, it comes from a celebration of literary achievement, but the very act of celebration also throws literature into doubt about itself, as it becomes a quantifiable good: a marketable book, a photographic authorial body, a series of values that can be stamped with institutional approval, coded into other discourses and re-packaged for their purposes. All of these angles on the materiality and situatedness of literature have the potential to throw us into doubt about our own cultural practices and assumptions. This is perhaps precisely what makes literary celebrity different from fame: famous authors are those ‘great’ writers who populate university syllabi and lists of ‘world classics’. General consensus reigns over their literary credentials, and people are happy to celebrate them within the confines of literature specifically for their literary achievements. They are safe. Celebrity authors, by contrast, are forever breaking out of the great hall of literature, or knocking on the door to be let in. They force reflection on the institution of literature: how it is constituted, why it matters and how it might be otherwise. They are dangerous. In as much as these terms are only ever categories we apply, authors may fall into both, depending on the kinds of questions we are asking of them and their significance. If literary celebrity is everywhere, then this special issue seeks to make it, and our own use of it, more visible.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, who funded the establishment of the ‘Authors & the World’ interdisciplinary research hub at Lancaster University (www.authorsandtheworld.com). This introduction, together with the articles that follow, is the result of our pilot series of seminars and workshops in 2014–2015. Accordingly, our thanks go also to the many delegates who helped shape a rich, diverse and intense intellectual environment for our contributors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, [Grant Number AH/K002597/1].

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Braun

Rebecca Braun is Senior Lecturer in German Studies and Director of the ‘Authors & the World’ interdisciplinary research hub at Lancaster University, UK (www.authorsandtheworld.com). She has written widely on literary prize culture in the Central European context, as well as on how the work of individual German-language writers engages with the twentieth and twenty-first-century media environment. Her monograph, Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass, was published with Oxford University Press in 2008. Recent co-edited publications include a special issue of the Canadian journal Seminar on ‘World Authorship’ with Andrew Piper in 2015, and, with Lyn Marven, the Cultural Impact in the German Context: Studies in Transmission, Reception, and Influence (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010).

Emily Spiers

Emily Spiers is Lecturer in Creative Futures at Lancaster University, UK. She is currently revising the final draft of her monograph, The Making of Pop-Feminist Narratives: A Comparative Study, for publication with OUP in 2017. She has co-edited with Birgit Mikus a 2016 special issue of Oxford German Studies on ‘Fractured Legacies: Historical, Cultural and Political Perspectives on German Feminism’. She is contributing a chapter on Kate Tempest to the forthcoming OUP volume Homer and Contemporary Women’s Writing, edited by Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos. Further recent articles on digital performances of authorship have appeared in the journals Feminist Media Studies and Woman: A Cultural Review.