From the Altar to the Market-Place and Back Again: Understanding Literary Celebrity

Decentring the Author: Refugee Tales and Collaborative Life Narrative as Activism

“…29 What this suggests is that literary celebrity embodies a 'distinct brand of fame' that springs from the intersections of art, entertainment, politics, and commerce; one that, paradoxically, passes as a kind of anti-celebrity, 'unsullied by the manipulations of commercial or popular culture', as literary scholar Wenche Ommundsen puts it. 30 To contend seriously that literary celebrity hovers somewhere above the baser realities of the marketplace is, at best, naïve; yet, this perception stems from, and continues to feed, a long-lived cultural myth in which the author figures as a prophetic authority through their combined, multiple identities of writer, teacher, social critic, and political activist.…”

‘Blockbuster’ celebrity feminism

“…While by no means homogenous in terms of how they embody this celebrity feminism, they also serve a different cultural and political function, with different effects (and indeed affects). Celebrity feminism, like literary celebrity (Ommunsden 2007), is a distinct mode of public subjectivity that offers some resistances to dominant ways of theorising fame and renown. In particular, these blockbuster celebrity feminists are not subject to the same degree of surveillance and interest in their daily activities that other types of celebrity are required to negotiate.…”

Introduction: re-viewing literary celebrity

“…Yet this is to determine, if not the death, then certainly the ossification of one's subject in advance. Because it is precisely in its challenge to the established position of literature as deliberately bracketed off from the masses that the phenomenon of literary celebrity as an area of academic enquiry was born in the first place (Moran 2000, Ommundsen 2007). With each renewed challenge to the existing literary order that becomes evident in sociological trends such as the one outlined by Holmes, we can perceive a new audience suggesting new answers to the question of how literature and its various related industries (academe, publishing, film) have value in the world.…”

“…It is an interpretative lens that can be used to explore how authors relate to a wider public in the most divergent of circumstances, from the by now well-trodden contours of the early twenty-first-century Anglo-American book market (Moran 2006, Ommundsen 2007, Glass 2014 to the Russia of Lenin and Stalin and the France of Voltaire and Rousseau. In fact, literary celebrity is everywhere, if we only know how to look for it.…”