Literary Celebrity Research Articles

Mel Weisburd: Secret Engineer of the Non-Existent City

ABSTRACT Recent attention to the literary history of Los Angeles has increasingly recognized the importance of the 1950s poets affiliated with Thomas McGrath. Building on those insights, this article argues that the accomplishments of that circle depended in no small part on the largely unsung efforts of the poet, editor, and environmentalist Mel Weisburd, who was responsible for, among many other things, cofounding and editing the durable little magazine known as Coastlines. A collection of Weisburd’s papers and audio recordings, only recently made available at California State University, Los Angeles, well illustrates the contributions of this complicated figure whose double life—environmental warrior by day, poet by night—sited him at two twinned nubs from which the cultural identity of modern Los Angeles would grow. Study of this collection helps to decenter a literary community often seen as anchored by the literary celebrity of singular figures such as McGrath and exposes the more complex and collective dynamics of literary productivity that prevailed in the so-called “non-existent city” of mid-century Los Angeles.

Blogs, tweets, and Insta: Digital paratexts in the postcolonial cultural industry

Exploring the work of Hanif Kureishi, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, and nayyirah waheed, this essay examines digital parataxis in the work of South Asian and Black diaspora writers. These writers create content on social media to engage audiences in complex ways, not exclusively motivated by marketing and literary celebrity. The social media content they produce are best understood as digital paratexts that become new, essential texts of their oeuvres and identities, irreducible to market logics and creating inroads with audiences in and beyond the postcolonial cultural industry. Through their work, this essay offers a framework for understanding the digital paratexts that postcolonial writers are producing as an integral part of world literature.

Andreï Makine – From Anonymity to Literary Fame

Andreï Makine – From Anonymity to Literary Fame. The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies that enabled Andreï Makine to go from being a penniless Russian immigrant living in a Parisian cemetery to becoming a celebrity in the French literary world. The first aspect to be considered is the use of pseudo-translation. Unlike another Russian writer in exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who always believed that his works would be read by his compatriots and have an impact on the Russian cultural space, Makine, who settled in France in 1987, decided to write in French, mainly for a French readership. However, his first two novels were rejected by the Parisian publishers who did not believe that a Russian could write so well in French, so Makine had to create fictitious translators in order to get his texts published. Another significant factor is the way in which he exploited his biographical aspects to create a personal mythology. The third, and perhaps most important, factor that has contributed to Makine’s consecration in the French cultural space is the way he describes his country of origin (he has been accused of creating an image of Russia that would be pleasing to Western eyes) and his host country, praising both the French language and, as the title of one of his books puts it, “this France that we forget to love". Keywords: pseudo-translation, hybrid identity, personal mythology, slavophilia, francité

The Study of Group Characteristics of the Scholars of “virtuous and outspoken” in the Third Year of Yuanhe

In the third year of Yuanhe of Emperor Xianzong of the Tang Dynasty, eleven scholars including Niu Shengru, Huangfu Chik, Li Zongmin, Li Zhengfeng, Xu Xi, Jia Jin, Wang Qi, Guo Qiu, Yao Gun, Yu Wei, and Ji Hongzong were admitted to the examination of the “virtuous and outspoken”. From the perspective of history and literature, eleven scholars in that year were placed at the core and studied, which in essence belonged to a branch of Mr. Fu Xuancong's research paradigm of “Imperial Examination and Literature”. The imperial examination not only provided these scholars with opportunities to enter the imperial court, but also continued to influence their political life and literary creation. Influenced by the subjects, most of them served in the first half of their careers as officials who criticized and admonished, embodying the characteristics of “speaking out and remonstrating extremely”. Among them, some scholars participated in the party struggle, and some scholars intersected with a generation of famous minister Pei Du. The quality of “speaking frankly and remonstrating extremely” accompanied their official career, and the connection with the dignitaries of the current dynasty influenced their career experience and became the intersection of their political activities. The life dominated by politics prompted them to pay more attention to political essays and words and things in their creation. Private words were mostly reflected in the poetry creation with chanting scenery and recording trivial matters as the main theme, and the poems given as a reward were also evidence of their intersection with literary celebrities such as Bai Juyi. , Similar official experiences and close literary experiences eventually constituted the group characteristics of these scholars.

‘Forget it’s between two women’: negotiating a queer Virginia Woolf in Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered authorial negotiations at work in adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s works and celebrity image in screen media, focusing on a case study of Vita and Virginia (2018) directed by British filmmaker Chanya Button. The article discusses Button’s film’s textual and promotional strategies, considering how it adapts both Eileen Atkins’ 1995 play of the same name and original historical correspondence between Woolf and the writer Vita Sackville-West. It draws upon critical models of literary celebrity, the celebrity biopic, and the concept of adaptation networks to argue that Button’s strategic choices in cinematography and details of mise-en-scène formulate an ‘archival’ gaze in order to forge connections between Woolf and Button as gendered authorial and celebrity personas. This creates a visual dialogue between women authors across media and time. The article suggests that Button’s processes of adaptation work to destabilise the essential queerness of the epistolary material and literary celebrity images as a result of this archival technique. This produces a representation of queer desire that distances body and mind and privileges an intellectual romance above a physical, desiring and embodied queer sexuality. This ultimately reinforces rather than reframes or reimagines a popular image of Woolf’s literary celebrity, focused instead on her status as a melancholic, suffering figure.

Introduction: Venice, Real and Imagined

Abstract: Despite its steady political decline, Venice was still a bustling center of commerce in the long eighteenth century and boasted a vivacious social and cultural life that attracted tourists and artists. The uniqueness of the city elicited a productive interplay between reality and imagination in the visual arts and in the memories of visitors. François-René de Chateaubriand, however, was unimpressed by Venice during his first visit in 1806. His letter to a friend laconically chronicling his negative view of the city was published in the Mercure de France and spurred a lively debate. The Venetian noblewoman, writer, and salonnière Giustina Renier Michiel countered the French writer's disdain for her city with a scathing, public response that solidified her fame and reputation for patriotism. Indeed, as Susan Dalton argues, Renier Michiel incorporated "strategic accommodations" in her response in order to safeguard her literary fame. One of the most fascinating aspects of Venice's uniqueness was this type of female agency and visibility, which was embodied by famous poets of the Renaissance like Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco and by celebrated eighteenth-century artists like Rosalba Carriera. Nevertheless, as John Hunt's essay demonstrates, female visibility and agency in Venice transcended social class. Even women of the lower classes partook in the city's political life thanks to their freedom of movement and access to valuable information. Records of witchcraft trials testify that some of them, in fact, exploited Venetians' passion for gambling and claimed to have the power to magically predict the names of the noblemen who would win elections.

«Наши одноборщники все, слава богу, здоровы». (Из комментария к письму Н.В. Гоголя В.В. Тарновскому от 2 октября 1833 г.)

The paper deals with the commentary on N.V. Gogol’s letter dated October 2, 1833, to his friend at the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences V.V. Tarnovsky. This letter, which has not yet been commented on with sufficient completeness and accuracy, discusses the mutual friends of Gogol and Tarnovsky, their former classmates living in the capital (A.S. Danilevsky, N.Y. Prokopovich, V.Ya. Prokopovich, N.V. Kukolnik, P.G. Redkin, V.I. Lyubich-Romanovich, etc.), as well as a circle of people close to them, with whom Gogol maintained contact. The letter’s biographical, historical, cultural, and literary context helps to compile a comprehensive academic commentary on it, using archival data and materials from printed sources on the history of the first third of the 19th century. That allows us to understand better Gogol’s interests, activities, and environment in the early 1830s. A study of the realities contained in the letter convinces us that Gogol, despite his acquired literary fame and acquaintances in the literary world, valued his relationships with his fellow countrymen and classmates, who still played a big role in his life and were keenly interested in how their destinies turn out.

Introduction: Life Writing through Refugee Tales

This cluster took off from an interdisciplinary and international workshop hosted at the University of Vienna in May 2022. Some of the original contributors turned their presentations into articles for this cluster; other articles were recruited later on. The original idea for both the workshop and cluster was inspired by the UK’s Refugee Tales project, founded and organized by David Herd and Anna Pincus. Some of the articles collected here discuss the life writing aspect of this project from different angles and positions: Patience Agbabi as contributing author to the first Refugee Tales volume, Sandra Mayer as a scholar of literary celebrity, and Sylvia Mieszkowski as cultural analyst. Other articles take a look at other projects in which displaced persons work on life narratives alongside citizens of the host countries: Jessica Gustafsson writes about the Swedish Flyktpodden podcast and Helga Ramsey-Kurz about the Austrian ARENA initiative. Two articles provide the collection with an opening frame, as they focus on the paradoxes that are perpetually produced by immigration law and the cultural conceptions of ‘the refugee’ in the European context (Judith Kohlenberger) and in Austria, specifically for minors (Ayşe Dursun and Birgit Sauer). An Afterword by one of the founders and organizers of Refugee Tales (David Herd) closes the cluster, offering an assessment of the project’s role in the context of the UK’s political situation in the summer of 2023, just after both Houses of Parliament passed the Illegal Migration Bill, which the UN has publicly denounced as contrary to international law.

‘My name is Death/But be na' fley'd’: Bishop Percy and the Ghosting of Robert Burns in Ireland

Recent decades have seen much scholarly exploration of Robert Burns’s impact on Irish writers, particularly those connected with the province of Ulster. Less explored is the antagonistic and opportunistic response to Burns in Ireland by a number of poets, editors and patrons. This article will chart Thomas Percy (1729–1811) and his literary circle’s responses in the Dromore area of County Down to Burns’s roles as poet, song collector and literary celebrity. It will argue that Percy and his associates reacted to Burns’s work and literary afterlife with a two-pronged strategy. First, they sought to emulate Burns through publishing or providing financial assistance to a number of texts of poetry and song. Secondly, they sought to establish a network of patrons and authors who employed literature as a means to portray a stable and loyal Ireland after the Union of 1800/1. As well as a heavily revised edition of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1795), the group created platforms for a variety of poets including Thomas Stott, Hugh Porter and Patrick Brontë. This strategy sought to invoke Burns directly as an influence, but also implicitly to exclude his legacy from shaping the writing of the circle. This article suggests that the strategy was not fully successful. Despite the generally good reception of Percy’s fourth edition of the Reliques, the other authors in the circle did not always receive praise for their work, and writers like Stott were criticised for their weak, sycophantic verse. It will claim that for some of this circle, such as Hugh Porter, Burns’s influence played a major role in shaping the promotion of their writing careers. However, for many, there was an attempt to manage the trajectory of the writer’s work and career that minimised the agency and reach of the author. Ultimately, notwithstanding the attempts to quell and minimise Robert Burns’s impact in County Down, his inspiration remained powerful and difficult to contain.

WESTERN PORTRAYAL IN “FORBIDDEN LOVE” BY HALID ZIYAUŞAKLIGIL JOINT RESEARCH PAPER

The great Turkish writer Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, who lived between 1865 to 1945, kept his literary fame for decades after his death. This came as a result of his contribution in the modern Turkish Literature. The reason behind this fame is due to his unique works. HalidZiya is considered one of the most important Turkish writers in the twentieth century. He enriched the Turkish literature with several literary works. He is considered in the first position among writers and authors because of the variety of his writing in addition to poetry, especially in the field of writing novels, and short stories. This variety came, in the first place, as a result of his passion toward French literature and the impact of it on him. He had a good knowledge of the western literature. He is considered on of the first Turkish novelists who wrote in the European (Western) style. He wrote literary works that bear the western literature concept. Halid Ziya occupied a high position in the field of prose. He became famous after publishing his novel “Aşk-ı Memnû” or “Forbidden Love”. It is considered one of the most important work among his novels in the history of modern Turkish Literature. Halid Ziya owned a good knowledge in the structure of the Turkish literature and its directions. The novel “Forbidden Love” is considered the best example in the field of literature because it showed his wide scope of knowledge successfully. He explored in this novel a detailed and analytical study of the Turkish grammar. We depend mainly in our research paper on this novel. It studies the different changes in time in the novel which is clear in the field of prose and the artistic work in the TV series nowadays. The novel “Forbidden Love” embodied main characters who are Nihal, Bahlool, Bihter, Adnan, and Basheer. The novel revolved on

“Quiet & Clever Together”: Reassessing the Significance of Elite Women and the Literary Culture of the Country House

ABSTRACT This article examines elite women’s agency and participation in the literary life of the country house, focusing on the circle that centred on Jemima Marchioness Grey and her husband, Philip Yorke, at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. The “Society at Wrest” was an exclusive group of close friends and family that included Grey’s childhood friends, Mary Gregory (née Grey) and Catherine Talbot, as well as her sisters-in-law, Elizabeth Anson and Margaret Heathcote (née Yorke). Most members of the Wrest Circle were careful about publishing their works, yet they found a cerebral escape in the shades of “Vacuna” – the name they affectionately gave to Wrest – as they created private literary compositions. Although Grey did not contribute to her friends’ literary compositions, she did, as hostess, play an invaluable role in providing a space at Wrest Park that facilitated and nurtured their intellectual and artistic endeavours. Disrupting the scholarly emphasis on public-facing female intellectuals, this article argues that for some elite women, the value of belonging to a coterie was not about attracting literary fame but rather having access to a permissive environment in which they could embark on private literary pursuits and belong to an exclusive and supportive intellectual network.

Yangzhou Revisited: Spatial Imaginaries and Women's Literature during the Qing

Yangzhou was known for its “women” but not for women's literature. Underlying literary imaginations about the beautiful women of Yangzhou were salt wealth and a commerce of women serving the wealthy during the late imperial period. The notoriety of this commerce seemed to exclude the possibility that Yangzhou might also boast accomplished women writers, like the cultural heartland of the Jiangnan region. This study revisits these assumptions in light of the literary sources and prominent cases that testify to the vibrancy of women's literary activities in Yangzhou. The city was a transregional literary center and a favored destination of sojourning poets and merchants, particularly those from Huizhou, creating opportunities for women to attain literary fame. Central to this discussion is a poetic language about sites and spaces that became current in Yangzhou during the Qing era. For a woman poet to place herself at the sites of Yangzhou that were repeatedly celebrated by poets was to claim membership in the elite networks or trends of cultural emulation formed on the basis of the sites. Viewed in transregional contexts, sites and spaces comprised the spatial imaginaries in women's literature—defined broadly as the spatial ordering of the world, and Yangzhou's place in it, as imagined and written about by women.

Resurrection Reading: Margaret Cavendish Drafts the Afterlife

Margaret Cavendish’s quest for intellectual and literary fame garnered infamy during her own lifetime—so she extended her pursuit of favorable renown into the afterlife, envisioning “a glorious resurrection in following ages” (“To the Two Universities,” in Philosophical and Physical Opinions [1655]). She sought to impart a residue of herself in her texts which could then be reanimated in the minds of readers: “I am industrious,” she declares, in Sociable Letters (1664), “to do some Work, wherein I may leave my Idea, or live in an idea, or my Idea may Live in Many Brains.” This essay situates Cavendish’s vision of living in the “many brains” of future readers within both her natural philosophical and fictional works. From the notions of perception, conception, and the composition of matter put forth in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), I extrapolate a theory of reading consonant with Cavendish’s vitalist-materialist worldview. From the speculative appendix of her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), I piece together a theory of resurrection and the mechanisms by which a fully material authorial afterlife might plausibly arise. These operations remain tentative in Cavendish’s explicitly scientific works, but they are more centrally enacted in her fictional Blazing World (co-published with Observations in 1666). I suggest that this text’s famously baffling scenes of soul-swapping, body-hopping, and world-building coalesce in modeling the kind of vulnerable authorship, collaborative readership, and intersubjective relationships that could produce the “glorious resurrection” in the minds of others to which Cavendish aspires. [S.R.]

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Nonpolitical Mann? Faustian Bargains and False Romanticism in Colm Tóibín’s The Magician

This essay explores how Colm Toíbín’s biographical novel The Magician, alongside Thomas Mann’s own writings, exposes contradictions in Mann’s definition of “nonpolitical,” the relationship to today’s culture wars, the risks of virtue signaling and cancel culture, and the Faustian bargain of literary fame and external validation versus empathy and real human connection. Building on her study, Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative, Rademacher argues that what biofiction does especially well is to illuminate powerful spaces of uncertainty. Such gaps of knowledge and “not seeing” are not internalized, apolitical actions, but expose unsettled, contentious questions that continue to act on our lives. Within this framework, it is fear of and retreat from the uncertain that complicates Mann’s thinking and fiction. Toíbín’s novel exposes how Thomas Mann internalized a false Romanticism that rationalized personal and political forms of detachment and disengagement. In turn, the biofiction reveals how individuals become lost when they use imagination not as a means of contesting reality to understand the always incomplete and evolving nature of the human condition, but in order to conceal or evade this inquiry—deepening deceptive fictions.

Piozzi and Wales

Piozzi and Wales

Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971): An Irishman in Berlin, 1939-1945

This paper summarises the fate of novelist Francis Stuart, who was initially close to the Celtic Revival, married Iseult Gonne and enrolled in the IRA in the Irish Civil War. After he reached some literary fame in the 1930s, in 1939 he was invited to give lectures in Germany and then to record radio programs meant to broadcast Nazi propaganda to neutral Ireland. Stuart related all these personal experiences in Black List, Section H, published in 1971. His activities in Germany during World War II were brought to broad daylight again in the 1980s and 1990s, causing fierce controversy in Ireland. This paper examines the reasons which may explain why a whole generation of Irish writers took sides with Stuart at the time, despite the evidence of his past involvement in the service of Nazi Germany, a commitment which transpires in Black List, Section H.

Middlebrow Culture and Mary Lavin’s Short Stories in The New Yorker

This essay, informed by scholarship on middlebrow culture, places Mary Lavin’s stories in the textual space of The New Yorker, reassessing the supposed ‘conservatism’ of her short fiction. Lavin’s literary fame has often been marred by her perceived conservative streaks – in terms of her literary sensibility and her gender politics. Lavin’s literary style is inclined to the realist mode, which appears to be old-fashioned in comparison with the experimentalist work of her modernist predecessors; moreover, her ideas of family and marriage largely adhere to established social mores, disconnecting her from the progressive feminist movement in the post-war years. This essay argues that both aspects of Lavin’s ‘conservatism’ should be radically reassessed by placing her stories in the context of The New Yorker and the magazine’s affiliation with middlebrow culture. Her seemingly conservative literary and gender views in fact register a critical attitude toward urban modernity and domestic ideals, which resonated with The New Yorker’s liberal, albeit complacent, middle-class readers. In particular, the essay reads Lavin’s island story ‘The Bridal Sheets’ as a critique of materialism; it also considers the symbolic currency of the widow figure in ‘In a Café’ vis-à-vis The New Yorker’s tepid gender politics in the mid-twentieth century.

Patronage, Performance, and Reputation in Sterne’s Early Clerical Career, 1737–1742

Whereas current research into Sterne’s life chiefly seeks to explore the connective sinews of the author’s social networks at the height of his literary fame, this essay argues that new pathways for investigating Sterne’s formative years can be discovered through the re-examination of his early clerical career. Whilst Sterne is usually treated as the focal subject when looking at the Church in York, the completion of an extensive historical investigation into Lancelot Blackburne’s archiepiscopate (1724–1743) has made it possible to reinsert him into a refreshed historical context and thereby test old assumptions about the formation of his clerical identity. This provides a foundation for the reassessment of patronage connections between Sterne and his uncle Jaques. Attention is also drawn to the case of Lewis Stephens (1689–1747), prebendary of York, and satirical writer — hitherto unknown to Sterne studies — whose experience of breaking patronage ties with Blackburne in the 1730s provides an instructive comparison for Sterne’s later rejection of the same in 1742. This essay utilises the guiding themes of patronage, performance, and reputation, and its findings are supported by new discoveries from the York diocesan archives and elsewhere.

The Political Peter Pan of the Literary World on the Stage with His Beggars: Educational Analysis

Little is known about the ‘Peter Pan’ of the literary world of the eighteenth-century England, compared to his contemporary authors. Even though some of the authors of his age have thick volumes of correspondence to their credits, John Gay’s correspondence is as thin as his social position and literary fame. Had it not been for the recent efforts of the editor of The Letters of John Gay, even the present petite volume of Gay’s correspondence would not have been available for any research work and this paper alike. His high ambitions in political preferment destroyed his literary dignity. This paper intends to investigate the socio-cultural background of the young indefatigable literary figure of the English literature against which his political role is foregrounded. The descriptive method is used to meet that aim. Given the results, The Beggar’s Opera as a true, actual and direct manifestation of national detestation of the corrupt political situation and the individual, thought to be responsible for it, endorsed its ‘suspected success’ and led ‘Peter Pan’ to be the nightmare of ministers.