Literary Celebrity Research Articles

Sanguineti, Mantegna, e l'ekphrasis tra omaggio e dissacrazione

Several twentieth-century writers, including Pound, Eliot, Gadda, Pasolini, Arbasino, and many others were interested in the paintings of Andrea Mantegna. From the Avant-Garde of the 1910s to the New Avant-Garde of the 1960s, poets and novelists considered the Quattrocento painter as a paradigm of formal perfection, emotional restrain, and even moral rectitude. In 2006, Sanguineti published a collection of fifteen poems dedicated to Mantegna. On the one hand, the Genoese poet is the last example of the revival of the old master. On the other hand, Sanguineti’s ekphrastic verses deconstructed the stereotypes associated with the literary celebration of Mantegna.

Settler Salvation and Indigenous Survival: George Copway’s Reconciliatory Vision, 1849–1851

From 1849 to 1851, Canada’s first international literary celebrity, the Mississauga writer Kahgegagahbowh, or George Copway, travelled the United States, Great Britain and Europe promoting his vision for the future of Indigenous peoples in the United States. Building on a theological critique of settler colonialism, he called for the creation of a new Indigenous territory west of the Mississippi led by a legislature made up of English-speaking Indigenous Christians. Copway believed that through the establishment of this territory he called Kahgega, European settlers would be able to atone for the sins committed against Indigenous North Americans, thus escaping the impending wrath of God. More importantly, believing that Indigenous peoples faced imminent extinction, he saw Kahgega as a permanent means of preserving his people and safeguarding their shrinking lands and political agency. Though Kahgega failed to impress the public, Copway’s vision offers a fascinating window into an early attempt at reconciling the Indigenous and non-Indigenous halves of North American society. Using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s definition of ‘reconciliation’, this article shows that past, often failed, Indigenous political visions reveal the complexities and tensions inherent in dialogue surrounding reconciliation.

“A guerra ia nos seguindo como a nossa própria sombra”: Brecht no exílio dinamarquês

O artigo versa sobre o período de 1933-1939 quando o poeta, dramaturgo e crítico teatral Bertolt Brecht exilou-se na Dinarmaca, a partir da ascensão do Partido Nacional Socialista ao poder na Alemanha (1933). Aborda o exílio como um tema historiográfico e sociológico e como fenômeno histórico no século XX. Caracteriza o período da República de Weimar como favorável às vanguardas artísticas, ao pensamento liberal, quando Brecht estabeleceu os princípios do seu teatro épico. Todo o intenso desenvolvimento teatral foi interrompido pela política de “alinhamento” que determinou a emigração dos maiores nomes da intelectualidade alemã. No exílio desde 1933, Brecht caracterizou a condição do exilado político e realizou a crítica ao nazifascismo através da poesia e da dramaturgia, em cartas, poemas, diários de trabalho. Através da abordagem da história intelectual é possível depreender a evolução de seu pensamento, assim como relações de amizade e solidariedade entre emigrados que consistiam em uma forma fundamental de sobrevivência, no sentido de atenuar o isolamento e permitir a continuidade dos trabalhos literários. Para Brecht, uma tarefa fundamental era mobilizar os emigrados, romper o conformismo, aproveitar-se de sua projeção literária para combater o regime nazista de fora do país.

Politicians' Personal Physicians: careers and complications from King David until today

Court physicians need to deal with a clientele posing particular personality problems (e. g. rex inutilis) in a difficult environment characterized by specific health issues (morbi aulici) and they may have to avoid serious risks or want to seek great opportunities (medicus politicus). Very few have been successful as King David, a former music therapist without a medical degree, or the dentist and president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. Several became victims of fatal circumstances. Not all could resist temptation of questionable literary fame at the expense of confidentiality. All told, a career close to high profile leaders needs to be considered carefully as risks may outweigh benefits.

Literary Celebrity and Queer Sexuality in the 1960s

Literary Celebrity and Queer Sexuality in the 1960s

Old Q in the Corner: Jane West, Late Life, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Jane West's late life and writings show a self-consciousness about authorship and a strong perspective on literary value and fame in old age. This essay shows how such a consciousness is revealed in a private letter, her last novel, Ringrove (1827), and her detail-filled will. West's late-life self-conception in a private letter as an ‘old Q in the corner’ deserves to be examined as a metaphor for the ageing female author. Taken together, these three texts demonstrate how West tries to shape readers' responses to old women as writers, using self-deprecating humour as a response to perceived neglect. The results are hardly comic, but they give us the opportunity to examine how a self-consciously older woman puts her words before a mass readership that was not necessarily well disposed to receive them.

Relacyjna koncepcja kultury literackiej i pisarze-celebryci

The author of the article proposes a relational analysis of literary culture. Relational research treats the newest model of literary production as a set of complex relations between the author and his or her image, the text, economics, marketing, criticism by the work’s audience, the media, the technological framework, and so forth. These relations provide the sphere of possibilities for literature and its agents. Increasingly intricate relations are drawing the fields of literature, the media, and economics nearer to each other; these fields are becoming more accessible in order to facilitate the exchange of various kinds of capital and to create conditions for the development of literary fame and author brands. The relational concept of literary culture provides a better tool for the analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of writer-celebrities, which is key to understanding the functioning of the entire field of literature.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk

From the literary field to reality TV: The perils of downward celebrity migration

This article explores ‘downward celebrity migration’, that is, when a celebrity enters a field that is less legitimate than their field of origin. It does so by studying the case of Lucía Etxebarria, a Spanish literary celebrity who participated in a celebrity reality TV show ( Campamento de Verano (‘Summer Camp’)) in 2013. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital, this article analyses the ambiguous hierarchical position that Etxebarria occupied in the programme and how she was evaluated according to the specific rules of reality TV: authenticity, ordinariness, performance and submission to the programme’s authority. Etxebarria’s presence in the programme stirred up a heated debate about social, cultural and fame hierarchies, and she became the target of attacks that tried to undermine her symbolic capital through personal humiliation.

Found in Translation

Abstract Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan achieved huge critical success globally during 2015–2016 with his translated novels Beauty is a wound and Man tiger, which have been praised for their sweeping historical scope, ‘magical realist’ elements, and experimentation with voice and genre. First published in the Indonesian language more than a decade earlier as Cantik itu luka and Lelaki harimau, these novels initially faced a relatively lukewarm reception locally. Only once Eka Kurniawan’s work had been ‘found in translation’ was he taken more seriously in Indonesian media coverage. This article charts Eka Kurniawan’s rise to literary fame, paying particular attention to the shifting tone and content of reviews, marketing, cover art, and media representations, as the translated novels circulated globally. I use this case to examine two key issues: firstly, the ways in which certain genres such as horror and crime are ‘othered’ in the Indonesian literary landscape; and secondly, how processes of translation, distribution, and reception outside Indonesia can significantly impact local interpretations of an author and their work. In doing so, this article demonstrates that the politics of genre and the power relations of international publishing both contribute to complex patterns of inclusion and exclusion from ‘local’ and ‘global’ literary canons.

Explorations in the Transmission of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka

This essay explores the identification of the island of Sri Lanka with the ‘Lankapura’ of Ramayana literary fame, tracing the transmission of the mythical geography of the epic from late medieval South India to Sri Lankan Tamil temple literature. The invading Cholas of the tenth century were the first to identify Sri Lanka as the ‘Lanka’ of the Ramayana, a geographical equivalence maintained by the Arya Cakravarti rulers who dubbed themselves ‘guardians of Rama’s bridge’ (cētu kāvalan). I highlight the uniquely sympathetic treatment of Ravana by the Hindus of eastern Sri Lanka, and explore the likelihood that Tamil impressions of Ravana impacted his appearance in Sinhala Buddhist literature from the fifteenth century onwards.

The Angel in the Publishing House: Authorial Self-Fashioning, Gender, and Orphanhood in Marie Corelli's Innocent

The best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli (1855–1924) is a literary figure enmeshed in contradictions. Famously refusing to identify as a New Woman writer, she was known for her womanly heroines and her own ultra-feminine style of dress. She shunned press photographers and ferociously protected her privacy. But Corelli was equally ferocious in her ambition for literary success and fame, and she does not altogether fit in with those women writers of the nineteenth century who staged an outer show of dominant domestic vocation and cast their fame as an unsought consequence of their natural genius. Through examination of Corelli's self-fashioned orphanhood, this article seeks to highlight her as an example of a fin-de-siècle woman writer who resisted consignment to the transgressive New Woman image and more traditional gender roles. Taking Corelli's critically neglected 1914 novel Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact as its focal point, and analysing the success of her self-fashioning by drawing upon the remembrances of members of Corelli's local community in Stratford-upon-Avon, recorded as part of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Oral History Project, this article explores the ways in which Corelli strengthened her orphan identity in her later fiction and, in so doing, strove to legitimise female authorship and celebrity.

Found through Translation: Female Translators and the Construction of ‘Relational Authority’ in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic

‘It is a pity that not someone like Christina Leonora de Neufville found the time to take on that work’, translator and author Elizabeth Wolff stated when she set eyes on one of the Dutch translations of Voltaire’s Mahomet (1741) in October 1770. Wolff’s comments on these translations provide fascinating insights into some of the underlying dynamics of the eighteenth-century Dutch literary marketplace, where translations made up an important part of the literary production. As recent studies in the field of translation studies have stressed, early modern translations seldom proved to be straightforward renditions of the original but provided eager and upcoming authors to make their claim to literary fame as the translator of more renowned authors. Translating in particular turned out to be a unique opportunity for many early modern European women writers, who often still struggled to establish their names. The case of the Dutch Republic, with its advanced print culture and strongly internationally oriented book market, however, remains hitherto understudied. This article examines the role translation played in the careers of three Dutch women writers by showing how they used their role as translators to establish and renegotiate their name and (literary) authority, often by interacting directly with the reputation of the translated author. We will use the concept of ‘relational authority’ to address the ways in which Wolff herself, as well as fellow authors Christina Leonora de Neufville and Margaretha Cambon-Van der Werken, used translation as a textual platform to convey their intellectual posture and voice. Our analysis will focus specifically on both the textual and visual dimension of their public image-building by considering how ‘relational’ representations appear in paratexts and portraits respectively.

James Fitzjames Stephen and the Landscape of Victorian Political Thought

In 1858 an aged and weakened James Stephen, the once-formidable “Over-Secretary of the Colonies” whose influence on the course of British imperial administration included such momentous tasks as drafting the bill to end slavery in the colonies and contributing to much of the administrative–constitutional groundwork for colonial self-government, wrote his son James Fitzjames words of encouragement on his rising writing career: “Time was when I enjoyed a repute as a writer of Edinburgh Reviews and from the bottom of my heart I hope as I sincerely believe that you will eclipse me even more than the elder Mill has been eclipsed by the younger.” For all the power he had exercised in the Colonial Office, and for all the worldly success that Fitzjames might enjoy in the legal profession he had been practicing for a half-decade at that point, there was something unique about literary fame that James wished his son to have.

Inside and Outside the Literary Marketplace: The Digital Products of Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie

For Indian authors writing in English, the changing landscape of publishing in the digital age presents both unique challenges and opportunities for claiming their authority as public intellectuals and producing content that exists both within the established literary marketplace and outside of it. This paper examines the digital products and platforms of three such authors, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, all of whom can claim substantial influence in the literary marketplace thanks to their traditionally published novels. In addition to their literary fame, they are well-known for their public commentaries using digital platforms like social media and blogs on everything from popular culture to politics. These digital products and platforms function to extend the authors’ literary products past the traditional literary marketplace and into the wider public, with the potential of dismantling certain barriers like income, language, and education levels that often shape the landscape of traditionally published work. For these authors, digital spaces provide largely unmediated avenues for reaching wider audiences, for cultivating their public intellectual personas, and for promoting issues which may or may not have an audience in the traditional literary marketplace.

Tyranny, Self, and Genre in Pliny's Letter 5.8

In Letter 5.8 Pliny shows that in the post-Domitianic era historia has become an impossible genre, both as a vehicle for conventional moral wisdom and because of the authoritative narrative voice it necessitates. The letter's literary strategies of deferral express these problems even as its content appears to argue positively the merits of historia and compare it with those of oratio. Pliny emphasizes the insufficiency of the narrative “I”, suggesting instead the importance of dialogue as the means both toward the ethical reconstruction of post-tyrannical discourse and the literary fame for which Pliny also hopes.

Commodifying the Author: The Mediation of Aretino’s Fame in the Harvey-Nashe Pamphlet War

This essay considers the ways in which one of the key literary events of the 1590s, the Harvey-Nashe pamphlet war, was influenced by the posthumous reputation of the controversial Italian author Pietro Aretino. This literary quarrel was important not only in defining the more aggressive tone of English satire in the 1590s, but also because it marked a key development in conceptions of authorial identity. Aretino was known as the prototypical professional author, having garnered fame and wealth through publication. However, by the time of the Nashe-Harvey debate he had become a symbol of Italianate vice in the minds of most English commentators. This essay suggests that the transformation of Aretino’s posthumous reputation was enacted by a process of ‘vanished mediation’ and will argue that a eulogy to Aretino from The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) displays Nashe’s acute awareness of the ways in which Aretino’s literary history had been rewritten by his detractors. The example of the posthumous treatment of Aretino’s reputation informed Nashe’s concerns over the reliability of print to preserve his own literary fame, an uneasiness he expressed most fully in Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596). [K.D.]

Langston Hughes, African American Literature, and the Religious Futures of Black Studies

ABSTRACT Following the propositions Elizabeth Alexander's keynote address, this essay begins by asking, How might a religious genealogy of Langston Hughes (and African American literature, in general) invite us to think differently about the future(s) of black studies? In response to this question, this essay traces a religious genealogy of Hughes's writing by moving backward across the span of his life from the 1960s, the decade in which he died, back to the 1920s, the decade in which we first achieved a degree of literary celebrity in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. As a provisional response to the question of a religious genealogy of African American literature, this rendering of Hughes's long literary career seeks to accomplish three tasks. First, this novel genealogy of Langston Hughes highlights a range of sources that, in turn, reveal a religious history in African American letters that has only just begun to receive scholarly attention. Second, in shedding new light on these ostensibly familiar sources, this essay suggests that such histories present scholars of African American literature, culture, and religion with a fecund set of possibilities for future work. Third, by bringing this genealogy to the fore, this essay also hopes to call attention to how a set of religious ideas often circulate (and are left unquestioned) in and around our conceptions of black studies.

Intellectual Interventions

This article aims to reframe understanding of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent public intellectual interventions by reading them as a meditation on messiness and texture. In doing so, it sheds light on the precarious politics and ethics that affect the work and reception of literary celebrities.

Newark Revisited: A Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century

Newark RevisitedA Philip Roth for the Twenty-First Century Michael Kimmage (bio) Philip Roth died in the second year of the Trump presidency. He was a critic of the new president in sharper terms than he had been of George W. Bush or even Richard Nixon, whose shadow falls across a number of Roth's novels. Apart from Roth's opposition to the Vietnam War, to which he devoted a small portion of his literary celebrity—his name, as it were—Roth was never an overtly political writer or an overtly political man. He was an FDR Democrat, and in this he was his father's son. That made him, as he surely knew, somewhat uninteresting as an American writer. It would have been interesting if he had, like John Updike, come out in favor of the Vietnam War. It would have been interesting if he had been a Marxist or a Zionist or a neoconservative. There is no political destiny for an American writer less gripping intellectually and culturally than to be centrist Democrat. For this reason, Roth had a political profile that almost erased itself. As times goes by, his boring political profile is likely to be erased from the memory of his life and career. As Roth himself would have been the first to argue, he should be remembered for his literature, for his many books, and not for the political positions he took in public or in private. Yet it would be a mistake to place politics on one side of Roth's critical reception and literature on the other. It would be an even worse mistake to do so in the wake of the Trump presidency, which has altered the texture of American politics and which has issued from an alteration in the texture of American politics. To these alterations Roth's literature has much to say. Events can occasion the rediscovery or rethinking of an existing body of literature—the Nixon presidency, for example, that made Roth think he was living in Kafka's America (see his 1974 essay "Our Castle"); or the reappearance of Moby-Dick in the 1930s after decades of callous neglect, just in time for Captain Ahab to accompany the fascist dictators leading their respective Pequods into the abyss. The Plot Against America has proven itself [End Page 79] a major novel of the Trump era, from which it will be forever inseparable as gloss and as prophecy, despite having been published in 2004. At least as rich is Roth's so-called American Trilogy and through it his literature of place, of de-industrialization, of American decay—in a word, his literature of Newark, New Jersey. This was the anti-celebratory fiction Roth fashioned in a decade far more hospitable to self-celebration. Finally, Roth's sense of himself as a civic writer and his sense of his novels as civic in nature and effect bears directly on the fractures and divisions of the Trump era. Roth's books are a meditation on a nation's story conceived in the glow of World War II patriotism and carried a bit beyond the end of the twentieth century. This meditation is frozen in time. It ceased with Roth's death in May 2018, but because it took shape in literature and is alive with the life of its readers, Roth's meditation is also ongoing. It evolves every time his books are read in real time. ________ Upon publication, The Plot Against America was misread as an exposé of the Bush administration. The misreading assumed it to be a roman à clef in which the Charles Lindbergh who assumes the presidency in place of Franklin Roosevelt represented George W. Bush. Indeed, this could only have been a misreading of Roth's counter-factual novel. Charles Lindbergh was famously an isolationist. He was an anti-Semite, a harsh opponent of FDR, and an American who was partial to the National Socialists in Germany, who in turn regarded him as the beau ideal of the Aryan hero. (Hermann Goering owed his ascent within the Nazi movement to his celebrity status as a World War I pilot.) The historical Lindbergh and the one...