Introduction: art and action: authorship, politics and celebrity

In 2015, the Irish Marriage Equality Referendum campaign found a fiercely outspoken advocate in the internationally award-winning Irish novelist and essayist Colm Tóibín. Throwing his full weight behind the campaign, he gave a talk at Trinity College Dublin on what it meant to be a gay man and writer in Ireland, which was subsequently reprinted as abridged versions in a wide range of news media, such as the Irish Times and The Independent (Doyle 2015, Tóibín 2015). Emphasising how the referendum campaign had ‘allowed us to speak openly about the terms of our love’, Tóibín (2015) made a powerful case for the constitutional protection of gay rights. More recently, acclaimed British novelist, broadcaster and journalist Jeanette Winterson joined the debate on authorship, anonymity and the problematic entanglement of the author’s life and work surrounding the revelation of best-selling Italian author Elena Ferrante’s identity (see Braun 2016a). In a piece for The Guardian she took a staunchly feminist stance, arguing that Ferrante’s exposure was driven by ‘pompous unthinking sexism’ and the ‘obsessional outrage at the success of a writer – female – who decided to publish and promote her books on her own terms’ (Winterson 2016).

These are just two recent examples of eminent authors of fiction taking advantage of their high public profiles and cultural capital in order to draw attention to specific socio-political concerns. Their powerful public interventions neatly tie in with a note of warning sounded by two-times Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel in an essay for the autumn 2016 issue of Index on Censorship. Speaking out on the ‘old struggles’ of censorship and self-censorship in different cultural and historical contexts, she was quick to remind authors of the potential political impact of their work: ‘If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all; the only tip you can give to a prospective writer is “Try to mean what you say”’ (Mantel 2016, pp. 66 and 68).

As demonstrated in Celebrity Studies 6 (4), a 2015 special issue, the present age of the ‘celebvocate’ (Tsaliki 2015, p. 235) has seen celebrities in all fields eagerly making forays into political activism, converting their ‘attention capital’ (Van Krieken 2012, p. 10) into discursive power and actual political influence (see also Brockington 2009, Tsaliki et al. 2011, Kapoor 2013). This Forum issue specifically focuses on the multi-layered intersections of literary celebrity and politics, exploring writerly field migrations between literature and the sphere of political engagement in the Anglophone world across historical periods and media. The Forum brings together four short essays that cast a spotlight on the close entanglement of authorship, politics and celebrity culture, a phenomenon which feeds on the cultural default expectation of the artist as propagandist and ‘hero-explorer’, as the eponymous character in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello puts it (Coetzee 2004, p. 172). The case studies featured range from the religious propaganda of an Elizabethan writers’ collective and the abolitionist activism of Harriet Beecher Stowe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s feminist body and fashion politics and J.M. Coetzee’s meta-commentary on Harold Pinter’s fiercely political Nobel Lecture. They thus draw attention to the long history of authors availing themselves of the mechanisms and structures of the ‘celebrity apparatus’ for the purpose of making much-noted public interventions, and highlight the sheer diversity of the socio-political causes promoted. While the individual contributions present the author as an important stake-holder in the field of literary production – one whose political outspokenness often constitutes a vital factor in the proactive creation of authorial identities – they also reveal that authorial agency is always in close dialogue with its structural frameworks and therefore has its limitations (York 2013, Braun 2016b). Emphasising the author’s embeddedness within a tight network of agents and institutions, the pieces shed light on the tensions that arise from media, industry and audience appropriation.

The writer’s position in the cultural imagination draws on the Romantic conception of the author as an enlightened poeta vates, a prophetic moral authority, who possesses superior insight and strives to appeal to the political and social conscience of his/her readership (Bennett 2005, pp. 55–71). As Tom Mole has shown, the apotheosis of the author in the Romantic period went hand in hand with the birth of literary celebrity culture, which has subsequently become a crucial factor in facilitating conversions of the writer’s field-specific cultural capital (Mole 2007). Katharine De Rycker’s contribution to this Forum on the Elizabethan pamphlet war between ‘Martin Marprelate’ and the established Church illustrates that literary celebrity had its antecedents in the early modern period. Attacking traditional Church hierarchies, the fictional persona of ‘Martin Marprelate’ relied on the use of strategies that still inform the production and consumption of celebrity today. The creation of a recognisable public persona and ‘brand name’ and the packaging of serious matters as entertainment were ways of mobilising the reading public and engaging new and wider audiences in political debate. De Rycker’s case study compellingly highlights the ‘subversive political function’ of celebrity even in its ‘nascent’ form, serving as a means of amplifying political messages and thus undermining the power of established authorities.

Field migrations, based on the conversion of celebrity capital (Driessens 2013), have been shown to entail considerable risks and pitfalls (see, for instance, Giles 2015, Arthurs and Shaw 2016). Celebrity authors engaging in political activism potentially face loss of prestige, charges of dilettantism and a precarious balancing act between artistic autonomy and meeting the demands of media, industries, institutions and audiences. Simon Morgan offers a poignant account of the challenges encountered by a best-selling female writer engaging in political activism in the nineteenth century. Drawing attention to the parallels between nineteenth and twenty-first-century celebrity activism, Morgan looks at the 1853 UK tour of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who used her extraordinary public exposure to promote the cause of abolition. While one of the few accepted and respectable ways for women in the nineteenth century to make public interventions was through their roles as ‘experts’, Beecher Stowe’s case demonstrates the vulnerability of a female literary-celebrity-turned activist, whose expertise as anti-slavery crusader was denounced in the press and undermined by controversy.

Late twentieth and twenty-first-century communication technology has opened up new ways for celebrities to disseminate their critical stances and opinions within a public sphere made up of diverse, transnational audiences (see Marcus 2015). Not surprisingly, then, well-known writers’ political messages have been delivered through widely publicised multi-media events marked by an unprecedented degree of immediacy, reciprocity, accessibility and an illusory sense of intimacy (Rojek 2016). Matthew Lecznar’s article on the fashion politics of celebrated Nigerian author and feminist critic Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie provides intriguing insights into the circulation of her political message via a transmedia space of fiction, fashion blogs, TED talks, pop tracks and catwalk shows. Making her interventions through a broad range of media channels, and thus combining literary, intellectual and popular forms and registers, enables her to reach culturally and geographically diverse audiences while at the same time increasing her celebrity capital.¹ As Lecznar shows, this makes her feminist fashion and body politics a double-edged sword, provoking charges of shameless self-promotion and compromising her artistic integrity.

The Forum is rounded off by Peter D. McDonald’s reflections on the wider implications of authors’ political responsibility and cultural authority in the ‘contemporary agora’, where they often experience a tension between ideals of artistic autonomy, the need for socio-political commitment and the imperatives of a celebrity-driven marketplace. McDonald explores the link between literature, politics and celebrity culture through an analysis of poet and playwright Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Lecture, an inflammatory polemic programmatically entitled ‘Art, Truth & Politics’, and its revisiting by fellow Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee in his autobiographically inflected Diary of a Bad Year. While Pinter chose to deliver a rousing political message as a ‘celebrity playwright-activist’ (as stated by McDonald), an uncompromising dissector of domestic and world politics, Coetzee, through the semi-fictional author-figure ‘JC’, remains doubtful about Pinter’s decision to step outside his own literary medium. McDonald’s close reading of these two texts raises pertinent questions about literature as a form of public intervention in its own right in today’s literary marketplace, which has given rise to the ‘author as multimedia pundit, the literary reader as consumer of fame and outspoken opinion’.

The following contributions to this Forum issue highlight the close and intricate ties between the spheres of literature, politics and celebrity culture and sharpen our awareness of the historical dimension of these interrelations. Tracing celebrity authors’ often uneasy trajectories between aesthetic and political performances, the articles shed light on the opportunities and challenges inherent to these authors’ multiple roles as politicians, activists and cultural critics: the potentially problematic entanglement of public and private selves and the conflict between ideals of ‘pure art’, industry and audience demands and the need to speak out. The pieces enrich the study of literary celebrity by demonstrating that we must not ignore its political dimension and impact, just as they deepen our understanding of literature as a social practice and form of public discourse positioned at the crossroads of art, action and entertainment.

Acknowledgements

This Forum issue has grown out of a one-day symposium entitled ‘Art and Action: The Intersections of Literary Celebrity and Politics’, which took place on 5 March 2016 at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and was kindly supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was kindly supported by the Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung - FWF) Austria [grant number J3576-G23].

Notes on contributors

Sandra Mayer

Sandra Mayer is a lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Vienna and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is currently working on a monograph that focuses on the intersections of authorship, literary celebrity and politics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.

Notes

1. Olivier Driessens defines ‘celebrity capital’ as ‘recognizability, or as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations’ (Driessens 2013, p. 552).