Literary celebrity may, at first sight, seem an obvious component of contemporary culture. It is not hard to find examples of contemporary British or American authors who have undeniably acquired the status of international celebrityâcomplete with their own fan clubs, extensive merchandise industry and overwhelming media attention. Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, for instance, have been styled todayâs literary celebrities. 1 Historical examples are equally in evidence since literary stardom is not confined to the present day. Among those writers who have often been associated with fame and celebrity are, for example, John Keats, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. 2 Yet even though extensive research has been conducted into these literary stars, literary celebrity itself remains a mysterious phenomenon. Take a closer look at these case studies, compare them, and one is soon faced with all kinds of complicated questions.
In the first place, there is the question whether the renown of a poet such as Keats is actually comparable with the 1930s media hype that surrounded an author like Stein. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the literary market did not as yet constitute an international multi-billion-euro business and the mediatization of society was still in its infancy, literary fame had a different meaning than it has in these times of professional marketing and social media. Keats was renowned in his day, that much is certain, yet it would be difficult to maintain that he was also a celebrity in the way that Stein was in her own time. Put differently, what is it, then, that makes an author a celebrity? What forms has fame taken through the ages and how have these evolved over time?
A second important question is whether we could actually speak of celebrities with respect to literary authors. A long-established tradition associates literary prestige with intellectual pleasures, cultural capital and elitist refinement, while celebrity is sooner linked up with popular entertainment, commerciality and mass production. Along these lines of argument, Dorothy Parker would more likely be called a celebrity than Jonathan Franzen. 3 Such a presumed dichotomy becomes the stronger as it resounds with widespread gender views: for instance, âwomenâs literatureâ is often associated with entertainment, commerce and a culture of hypes, whereas authentic literature is often alleged to be a male domain. 4 Such dichotomies have often been criticized, and rightly so, but the fact remains that, apparently, literary success takes different forms that cannot simply be lumped together. Are authors literary celebrities because of their sales figures and structural media attention, or, rather, because of the official recognition accorded by professional criticsâand what about figures like J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson and J.K. Rowling who owe their status in part to a solid fan base? Is literary celebrity the product of a combination of compatible success factors or is it foremost an umbrella term for strongly divergent values, ranging from aesthetic and affective to economic and socio-cultural?
A third question that the phenomenon of the star author raises concerns the writerâs authorityâand authority over the writer. An authorâs stature is created within a variable tension field of power relations where different parties claim authority: writers themselves, obviously, but also their peers, critics, readers, fans, the media, literary agents, journalists, publishers, translators, theaters and film studios, and so on. All these parties have a share inâas well as interests inâdetermining the value and meaning of the work and the public image of its author. During their lifetime, authors are supposed to adopt a position within this tension field: in their endeavor to retain a certain measure of agency, some reject their success whereas others embrace their popularity and all the media attention. In brief, strategies to assume and retain authority can differ widely. Norman Mailerâs authorship, for instance, is characterized by an active and shrewd form of self-promotion, while, in contrast, a writer like Don DeLillo shies away from the celebrity industry in an attempt to retain and exert a form of control over his authorship. 5
Yet, whichever position authors adopt, it is certain that they have anything but the last word. Readers, critics, admirers and other actors in the literary field appropriate the authorâs work and image. They already do so during the authorâs lifetime and even more so after their idolâs death. When the oeuvre is complete and the author can no longer talk back, literary celebrity only exists by the grace of the authorâs afterlivesâthe posthumous image of the writer as created by readers, critics, editors, fans and adaptors. These individuals and groups reframe, reinterpret and re-visualize the authorâs words, looks, body and life. In doing so, they ensure a prolonged afterlife for their idol, but at the same time they re-author, in a sense, the authorâs image and oeuvre. The question, then, becomes: who is the author of the authorâs life story, and how does that story evolve after the authorâs death, as his image takes on an afterlife of itself?
It is in particular this third questionâabout the interaction between, on the one hand, authorial self-presentation and, on the other, the public appropriation we encounter in the authorâs reception and afterlifeâthat we focus on in this volume. Since there is a wealth of articles and studies in the field of authorship, celebrity and afterlives, we have opted, for this Introduction, to precede the various contributions with a partly historical, partly conceptual framework, where we problematize the concept of literary celebrity authorship. For this purpose, we will draw upon existing research literature so as to provide our readers with reference points in the broad area of research at the interface of celebrity studies, literary studies and cultural history. The subject of this collection demands that we outline and interconnect three concepts in this Introduction: celebrity, authorship and afterlife. In the first section we examine the history of celebrity as well as the theories that have been developed around it. Then, focusing on authorship, the second section offers a further characterization of literary celebrity authorship as a function with several variables. The third section is devoted to a conceptualization of the notion of afterlife. Finally, in the fourth section we provide a preview of what is to follow in this volume, where our central thread remains the intriguing interplay between the self-representation of literary celebrities and the way in which their image is appropriated and transformed by readers, critics, fans or other actors. Celebrity authorship and its afterlives, it will transpire, are inextricably interwoven, but their mutual relationship often proves, in practice, to take on the shape of a fierce struggle for authority over the writerâs image.
Celebrity & co.
Opinions differ as to the origin of celebrity. Richard Schickel states firmly in Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (1985) that âthere was no such thing as celebrity prior to the beginning of the 20th centuryâ. 6 In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962) Daniel Boorstin argues that it is particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century that celebrity culture manifests itself. 7 Fred Inglis identifies an earlier starting point in A Short History of Celebrity (2010): the mid-eighteenth century, when, he argues, the development of urban culture and the theater as the art of performance par excellence were of crucial importance. 8 Robert van Krieken goes even further back in time in Celebrity Society (2012) as he points to the similarities between contemporary celebrity culture and the court culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the role of its âeconomy of attentionâ in the construction of social identities. 9 Finally, if we take fame to be synonymous with celebrity, the roots of celebrity culture can be seen to reach as far back as classical antiquity: in The Frenzy of Renown (1986...
