Posthumous Fame Research Articles

Pervivència i memòria de Maria Josepa Massanés: la creació d’una imatge

This article analyses the various paths that, over the decades between her death and the Second Spanish Republic, led to Josepa Massanés (1811–1887) enjoying a posthumous fame uncommon among nineteenth-century women writers, thanks in no small part to Massanés’s own efforts to construct and preserve her own legacy. Examination of the evolution in interpretations and, most importantly, assessments made by different intellectuals over this period produces a complex and multifaceted vision of her significance as a writer in Spanish and Catalan: from the first of the 19th-century Spanish women poets to a core figure in the Renaixença and even a feminist pioneer. Among these, it is, above all, Dolors Monserdà who will be seen to have worked the hardest to keep Massanés’s memory alive, modifying the picture she painted of the writer to suit changing times.

‘Hazy Cosmic Jive’: composing presence and absence in Moonage Daydream (2022)

ABSTRACT As the V&A museum in London announce their acquisition of over 80, 000 pieces from the David Bowie estate to be exhibited in 2025, and in the immediate wake of Celebrity Studies’ special issue on the ‘maintenance and reassessment of posthumous fame’ (Boyce and Dove 2022a, p. 485), this paper will perform a textual autopsy on Moonage Daydream (Morgen, 2022), highlighting how Morgen extends existing parameters of eulogising the famous. Drawing upon scholarly convergences between stardom and death studies that pivot on a paradoxical interplay of presence and absence, this analysis will begin by outlining how remembrance rituals can offer a conceptual vocabulary to dissect recurring tropes in designing the deceased. It will then examine how Moonage Daydream adheres to a traditional posthumous discourse of preserving and fossilising Bowie’s recognisable star features. How the film disrupts a standard regeneration of bodily presence in absence will then be considered, exposing tensions between the material and immaterial, preservation and dissolution, the mortal and immortal. Overall, this study will propose Morgen’s reanimation of Bowie signposts possibilities for further creative resurrections of the famous during their media afterlife, offering an alternative rhetoric in the composition of death in visual culture.

Queer Remains: Mourning and Inheritance in Lo Yi-chin’s Banishing Sorrow

This article examines Lo Yi-chin’s 2001 novel Banishing Sorrow, a controversial tribute to the late Taiwanese queer author Qiu Miaojin. Renowned for her writings on nonnormative desires, Qiu attracted a cult following in the wake of her suicide in 1995, but her posthumous fame has paradoxically eclipsed her nuanced vision of gender and sexuality since her skepticism toward fixed categories is potentially at odds with the quest for identity and recognition in the local LGBT rights movement. Published six years after Qiu’s death, Lo’s Banishing Sorrow represents a bold effort to challenge the identity-based approach to Qiu’s work. Echoing the metaphor of the disorderly body in Qiu’s writings, Banishing Sorrow deploys the trope of corporeal fragmentation to problematize how sexual identities have become essentialized and fixed in her postmortem reception. Reading Lo’s tribute alongside Qiu’s oeuvre, this article draws on theories of mourning, spectrality, and animacy to explore how Banishing Sorrow opens up new possibilities for Qiu’s afterlife beyond the confines of identity politics.

‘Obituary, gender, and posthumous fame: the New York Times Overlooked project’

ABSTRACT This article examines the New York Times’ ‘Overlooked’ project, an online memorialising enterprise dedicated to providing ‘forgotten’ celebrities (mostly women) with retrospective obituaries. Launched on International Women’s Day 2018 with the aim of addressing the gendered and racialised inequalities inherent in obituary selection, the project attempts to rectify the NYT’s omission of notable figures from its obits section. Focusing on two case studies from the first cohort of these belated obits – Charlotte Brontë and Ida B. Wells-Barnett – this article examines how the retrospective nature of the project affects the structure, content and function of the celebrity obituary. Considering the issues at stake in remembering and reframing ‘overlooked’ lives from the past, it questions whether focusing on historically overlooked celebrities works to redress social injustice and increase diversity of representation in the present.

Posthumous Fame and Local Celebrity: The Campaign to Erect the Hemans Memorial

ABSTRACT This essay traces the late-Victorian campaign to erect a monument to Felicia Hemans in Liverpool, the city of her birth. The campaign was conducted through reports and correspondence in the liberal newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury, which itself supported the campaign. Drawing on recent critical work relating to the recovery of women’s writing, nineteenth-century understandings of celebrity and fame, and the high-Romantic idea that true literary success is posthumous, the essay analyses the representation of Hemans and her work in this public correspondence, and its engagement with Hemans’s international fame and literary achievements. The essay argues that concepts of celebrity (as opposed to literary fame) were used to devalue the work of women poets, particularly those who benefitted from contemporary innovations in print culture, and the exponential expansion of print markets in the Victorian era, and that the treatment of Hemans in this campaign offers insights into the erasure of women from the twentieth-century canon.

The meaning of freedom during the Cold War in the light of Andrzej Bobkowski’s Guatemalan prose

The Polish writer Andrzej Bobkowski (1913-1961), who defined himself as “the hooligan of freedom”, achieved posthumous fame and recognition from Polish readers, however, in Guatemala, his adopted home, he is known mainly as “Querido Bob” who founded the “Guatemala Hobby Shop”. Bobkowski chose Guatemala as his home to defend his own sense of individualism and dignity which had been shaken by his disillusionment with Europe in the face of both Nazism and communism. From Bobkowski’s perspective, his escape from Europe in general, and from the Polish Second Republic in particular was a way to remain free from the ossified pseudo-values of the old continent, which had failed the test of the Second World War. Bobkowski, especially in his essays “Na tyłach” [“Behind the front”] (1949) and “Pytania dzikich ludzi” [“Savages’ questions”] (1951), contrasted Europe with Guatemala or indeed with all of Central America. Andrzej Bobkowski described his life in Guatemala, providing also a rich commentary about the world in the 1950s, particularly in “Notatnik modelarza” [“From a Diary of a Model Maker”] and in his letters to his mother. This paper aims to reconstruct and discuss how Querido Bob as a European understood the meaning of freedom and how he confronted his inherited paradigm of ideas with the reality of Guatemala and its society, which was facing its own challenges.

Forever Gor Gor, changing fans: Leslie Cheung posthumous fandom revisited

ABSTRACT Yiman Wang’s 2007 chapter investigates Hong Kong superstar Leslie Cheung’s enormous fandom during the first few years after his suicide in 2003. Seventeen years have passed but Cheung’s posthumous fandom has continued to grow, passing onto younger generations and forming a unique cross-border cultural phenomenon. This article presents a case study of a local fan site in Chengdu, China, Zhongqing Café, its owner Mr Lv, and its fan community. Based on data I collected on a visit to the Café in 2019 and my observation of its social media activities, the article examines how the Café functions as a cultural, economic, social, and familial space for local and trans-local Leslie fans. It offers a glimpse into Cheung’s posthumous fandom in Mainland China from affective, creative, economic, political, generational and identificatory perspectives. The article draws attention to the emergence of fan-entrepreneurs and their significant role in sustaining stars’ posthumous fame. It also highlights the process of deification, normalisation and depoliticisation in young Chinese fans’ consumption of Cheung, and argues this should be understood in relation to their need to build individual and collective identities within China’s current social and political context.

Benjamin Ball (1834–1893), premier titulaire de la chaire des maladies mentales

Benjamin Ball's posthumous fame is due solely to his being chosen in 1877 to become the first holder of a new chair created in 1875 at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, the Chair of Mental and Brain Diseases. His training, outside of asylums but with two prominent professors of mental illness, Jacques Moreau de Tours and Charles Lasègue, enabled him to have a full career as a teacher, appreciated by his numerous students for his expertise and verve. His chance meeting in 1858, during his time as a resident, with the then young Jean-Martin Charcot led him to write an innovative thesis, on venous thrombosis in the limbs and pulmonary embolism, which should have contributed more to his fame. We present here a few of his most notable publications, among the 100 or so that he authored.

Sigmund von Birken, der Literaturbetrieb, Netzwerke und Werkpolitik

Abstract Sigmund von Birken belongs to the »Trio of poets from Nürnberg«, together with Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and Johann Klaj whose posthumous fame is mainly due to their pastoral poetry with fullsounding verses in praise of peace and love. Birken started his career with an enormous upshot as organizer of multi-media spectacles during the peace ceremony in Nürnberg in 1650. Apart from his hymns and pastoral love poems, Birken’s poetry does not belong to the canon of early modern literature in Germany. If he had lived longer, he would probably have edited later all those poems which he had written on demand for special occasions and immediately published as separate brochures or leaflets in at least four huge volumes. He would have properly arranged love poems, odes in praise of friendship, poems dedicated to noblemen and civilians, hymns and secular songs, starting like his famous predecessors with his Latin verses. This ambitious publication project is outlined in his manuscript collections, but was not realized during Birken’s lifetime. To correct for this oversight, the commented edition of Birken’s complete poetic manuscripts, which was recently finished by Hartmut Laufhütte, gives a broad impression of his talents as a playful virtuoso in all kinds of genres, teacher of poetry, advisor, ›ghostwriter‹ and promotor of young poets, male and female alike. His diaries and correspondence account for his enormous productivity and versatility, thus enabling modern readers to watch him during the creative procedure more closely than any other German poet of his time. The edition of Birken’s manuscripts is on the same scale as a few other recently completed long term editions of early modern German ego-documents and poetry and sets high standards for further editions.

Gustave Étoc–Demazy (1806–1893) : l’aliéniste manceau élève de Guillaume Ferrus

Gustave Étoc–Demazy (1806–1893), one of the brilliant students of Guillaume Ferrus (1784–1861) at Bicêtre Hospital, spent his long career as an alienist directing the asylum in Le Mans, recently constructed when he arrived in 1834. His modest posthumous fame, reaching beyond the Sarthe region, is worth highlighting, on the basis of his doctoral thesis on stupidity, for example, which was an early milestone of his research throughout the 19th century on acute (mental) confusion. Following a short biography and an analysis of his inaugural work, we review some of his publications on subjects such as suicide and the alienist's role in the administration of justice.

Speech style as political capital: Barack Obama’s Athens speech

ABSTRACT This paper provides a speech stylistic analysis of Barack Obama’s 2016 Athens speech, and it argues for a culturally conscious take on speech style, which links it to the accumulation of political capital, at least in the context of political speeches. With a focus on stance and intertextuality, the main argument put forward is that Obama constructs a dialogue with Ancient Greek thought, which does not simply draw on experiences and events; rather, it recreates them and, eventually, it creates a whole understanding of cultural politics. Against this take on politics based heavily on Greek democracy legacy, for Obama, his performance serves as his consignment to the global political discourse through an effort to join a very well established and highly respected democratic tradition stemming from (Ancient) Greece, whose sociocultural impact is felt vividly in contemporary US. In this sense, his accumulation of political capital serves as his effort to achieve posthumous fame (ystero’fimia) after his stepping down from the US administration.

Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics by Arash Abizadeh

Reviewed by: Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics by Arash Abizadeh S. A. Lloyd Arash Abizadeh. Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 288. Cloth, $99.99. Arash Abizadeh's main thesis is that Hobbes severed juridical obligation—a covenant-created practice of second-personal accountability—from allegedly prudential natural law, marking a "watershed" separation of the right from the good. Daniel Eggers ("Liberty and Contractual Obligation in Hobbes," Hobbes Studies 22 [2009]: 70–103), Mark Peacock ("Obligation and Advantage in Hobbes' Leviathan," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 [2010]: 433–458), and David D. Raphael ("Hobbes on Justice," in Perspectives on Hobbes, edited by G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, Oxford, 1988, 153–70) fruitfully explored that thesis. The proposed independence is doubtful because natural law both underwrites and constrains covenant: "a covenant, if lawful, binds by the force of natural law . . . if unlawful, binds not at all" (Latin Leviathan, xiv.33). If Hobbes had justified covenanting by this practice's promotion of our good, Rawls's classic "Two Concepts of Rules" explains how a practice (like promising) can entail owing things to particular others who have authority to demand them, even when/ if justified by appeal to the good. It would be a mistake to construe a goodness-justified practice of covenanting as an entirely independent ethics of rightness, as Abizadeh proposes. What this conspicuously-erudite, contemporary-distinction-packed effort ultimately provides is the familiar view that Hobbes's laws of nature are precepts of prudence directing individuals toward their alpha-good of commodious self-preservation. Abizadeh implausibly claims that interpreters widely suppose Hobbesian prudence includes only bare avoidance of death, not of misery, the deprivation of a "commodious life" (135). He rebrands this latter notion "felicity," which, in line with the "egoist-hedonist psychology" he attributes to Hobbes (229), is the mental pleasure experienced in hopefully anticipating (imagining) the satisfaction of one's future desires based on past successes. His differentiation of Hobbes's notion of felicity from related historical conceptions echoes James Hamilton's "Hobbes on Felicity" (Hobbes Studies 29 [2016], 129–47). All prudential interpretations are hard-pressed to explain how laws of nature—if self-preservation-centric—can have purchase on the many ordinary, rational citizens with (often politically destabilizing) transcendent interests, making them willing, if necessary, to lose their lives for loved-ones' welfare, personal honor, salvation, posthumous fame, or righteous causes. S. A. Lloyd's Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, [End Page 174] 2009) extensively documented textual evidence, and developed arguments against any inescapable, overriding concern for bodily self-preservation, in favor of understanding the natural desire for self-preservation as merely morally blameless. Abizadeh reproduces much of this. David Johnston, in The Rhetoric of Leviathan (Princeton, 1986), recognized that people often do not prioritize self-preservation, and hypothesized that Hobbes sought to debunk all religion as superstition so that governments could retrain humans to become the self-preservation-centered rational egoists needed for a state's threat of capital punishment reliably to compel their obedience. Famously, Bernard Gert ("Hobbes on Reason," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 [2001]: 243–57, and elsewhere), argued that Hobbes offered an objective morality whereby reason requires that we pursue our preservation and broader prudential good regardless of our desires. Abizadeh adopts Gert's position. A serious difficulty is that Hobbes nowhere states any normative requirement to desire and pursue one's own good or preservation. On Abizadeh's account, the laws of nature become precepts for securing self-preservation and felicity (137, 188). Felicity may include pleasures from anticipatorily imagining satisfaction of a desire to preserve honor at the cost of capital punishment, or for suicidal relief from misery. This incoherently renders laws of nature prudential precepts for both self-preservation and voluntary self-destruction. Problematically, pursuit of felicity can, depending on desires, license vicious actions forbidden by natural law. Abizadeh cannot establish that natural laws bind only those whose felicity does not require violating them, because Hobbes insists they bind everyone with reason enough for self-government. Abizadeh needs the strategies for self-preservation and felicity never to diverge, so he stipulates it: "felicity can...

The Afterlife of Aldus. Posthumous Fame, Collectors and the Book Trade , edited by Jill Kraye and Paolo Sachet, London, The Warburg Institute, 2018

The Afterlife of Aldus. Posthumous Fame, Collectors and the Book Trade , edited by Jill Kraye and Paolo Sachet, London, The Warburg Institute, 2018

“Beyond Death”: John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Posthumous Influence

This essay argues that John Webster's 1611 drama, The Duchess of Malfi, attests to the power of death to shape selfhood and demonstrates the influence of textual monuments on the living. As Webster notes, posthumous fame is not based solely on its ability to console, but rather on “the dignity of a great example,” which is shown at the end of the play through the Duchess’ continuing influence on other characters. Reactions to both her dead body and the edifice constructed in her honor highlight the transformative power of the Duchess’ death and monumentalization. Specifically, The Duchess of Malfi offers audiences a gendered type of memorial, one based on the ability of a female character to posthumously influence the actions of others.

Georges Gilles de la Tourette and his legacy

The first comprehensive description of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome as a neurological condition dates back to 1885 when Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904) published his case series of nine patients sharing the clinical triad of tics, echolalia, and coprolalia. At the time, Gilles de la Tourette was working at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France, under the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), one of the fathers of modern neurology. It was in fact Charcot who credited Gilles de la Tourette with the description of the syndrome that was named after him and gave him eponymous fame. Gilles de la Tourette's character was described as talented but erratic, and his life was relatively short for current standards but far from uneventful. Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, the complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by multiple motor and vocal tics, is undoubtedly his main legacy. The importance of the 1885 article was greatly underestimated at the time of its publication, partly because Gilles de la Tourette's main interests lied in the field of hysteria and hypnosis. Throughout the first half of the XX century, his name was progressively neglected, as the psychoanalytic paradigm that prevailed associated tics with rare and somewhat bizarre psychologically driven manifestations. However, Gilles de la Tourette's posthumous fame resurged during the 1960s, concomitant to a paradigm shift whereby the development of neurobiological models drove the renaissance of the scientific study of tic disorders, together with a reappraisal of Gilles de la Tourette's initial contribution.

Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.

<i>Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry</i>. Michael Gamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+307.

Sayyid Qutb: The Emergence of an Islamist Calling for Social Justice in Islam, 1906–1948

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 42, No.1, Fall 2018 Sayyid Qutb: The Emergence of an Islamist Calling for Social Justice in Islam, 1906–1948 Adnan A. Musallam* Introduction This is a biographical inquiry into Sayyid Qutb’s life (1906–1948), who was an Egyptian teacher, poet, journalist, literary critic and a leading but highly controversial intellectual of the contemporary Islamic movement in Egypt, the Arab and the Islamic world. Qutb was imprisoned with many of the rank and file of the Society of Muslim Brothers from 1954–1964 and was subsequently rearrested and tried in 1965 and 1966 for allegedly leading an underground apparatus which was conspiring to overthrow the late president Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s regime by force. Qutb is noted for a revolutionary zeal with which he promoted what he considered the inevitable establishment of a true and just Islamic society in place of the “Jihili” (pagan) society which exists throughout the world including Egypt. This revolutionary thought which appears in his controversial work Ma’alim fi al-tariq (Milestones on the Road), 1964, was utilized by the Egyptian state security prosecutor’s office in building its case against him and was instrumental in sending him to the gallows in August 1966. Qutb’s posthumous fame: 1966–present, and the impact of his controversial thought on radical Islamist resurgence and global jihadists are well known, but are not the focus of my presentation today. My focus, instead, is on the years 1906–1948 and Qutb’s emergence as an Islamist calling for social justice in Islam. 1 *Adnan A. Musallam: Earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. His interest is Contemporary Arabic/Islamic Thought; Contemporary History of the Arab World and the Middle East; and Contemporary Arabic Literature. He is an associate professor of history at Bethlehem University, Palestine and he is an active member of Al-Liqa’s Board of Trustees. 2 Problems in Researching Sayyid Qutb’s Biography Students wishing to pursue an objective study of Sayyid Qutb should be aware of the obvious shortcomings of the existing literature. For example, M.M. Siddiqui’s “An outline of Sayyid Qutb’s life”1 and S. Badrul Hasan’s Sayyid Qutb Shaheed 2 are typical examples of partisan literature; they lack documentation and present questionable biographical information. Thus, in Siddiqui’s work the inaccurate and undocumented account of Qutb’s family relocation to Cairo’s suburb Hulwan is described as follows: “Sayyid’s parents, realizing the gifts of their son, were concerned about his education and so they moved to Hulwan a suburb of Cairo, and Sayyid entered Tajhiziyah Dar al-‘Uloom.3 In Badrul Hasan’s work the same account is repeated but in a more ornate and melodramatic language: “The parents of Sayyid were very keen and anxious to have this brilliant and promising child of theirs sent for higher education. As luck would have it, the parents of Sayyid, leaving the village, settled in Hulwan, a satellite town of Cairo. Thus providence paved the way for educational progress and eminence for Sayyid. He entered the Secondary School of Cairo named Tajhiziyah Dar al-‘Uloom.”4 In actual fact, however, Qutb left his village around 1921 to live with his maternal uncle in the Zaytun suburb of Cairo in order to continue his education. His family did not move to Hulwan until after the death of his father in about 1933 when Sayyid was already attending Dar al-‘Uloom.5 Likewise, Siddiqui gives the following inaccurate account of Qutb’s career after his graduation from college: “Sayyid entered Dar- al-‘Uloom in 1929 and completed his B.A. in Education in 1933. Immediately after the completion of his degree he was appointed a lecturer in this college.”6 In Badrul Hasan the same misinformation is given but with an added touch of melodrama: “He was appointed professor in this college because of his God-given intelligence. For some time he displayed his capabilities in Cairo University.”7 However, Qutb did not teach in Dar al-‘Uloom or Cairo University following his graduation in 1933. Instead, he was appointed elementary school teacher of Arabic in the...

The Forgotten Philosopher: A Review Essay on Richard McKeon

In her well-known piece on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that “posthumous fame… seems to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones.” It is achieved by “those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.” If she is right, then there may be some hope that Richard McKeon will one day have his moment. For McKeon (who was, in fact, a friend of Arendt) is eminently unclassifiable. Born in 1900, he studied philosophy both with the great French medievalist Étienne Gilson and with John Dewey. He was a twentieth-century American pragmatist who sought to revolutionize philosophy so that it could deal with the novel challenges of a technological age. Yet he was also a brilliant scholar of classical and medieval thought, who wrote such articles as “Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century,” “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” and “The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West.”

La fama póstuma de Quevedo en los paratextos de sus obras impresas y en la biografía de Pablo de Tarsia

The posthumous fame of Quevedo is a heterogeneous construction that proceeds from several instances. This article describes how the author’s image is portrayed in the paratexts of his printed books in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (1645–1726) and through the narrative that the historian Paul of Tarsus constructs of his life.

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of “On War.” By Vanya Eftimova Bellinger.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+298. $29.95.

<i>Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman behind the Making of “On War.”</i> By Vanya Eftimova Bellinger.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+298. $29.95.