The celebrity of anonymity and the anonymity of celebrity: picture identification and nineteenth-century British authorship

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines how the spaces between the words and images of various forms of picture identification (portraits, cartes de visite, and early cinema) navigated the space between anonymity and identification to construct British writers as celebrities during the long nineteenth century. Literary authors in that period did not become celebrities by words alone, but through intersemiotic relations between words and images. These relations varied across technologies and ideologies, sometimes collaborating, sometimes vying for dominance, and sometimes contradicting each other. These relations complicate and challenge late twentieth-century theories of authorship as well as illuminating nineteenth-century dynamics.