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Introduction: Starring the Author
No full textLiterary celebrity is by now a familiar feat of contemporary literary culture, but it continues to raise complex questions about the history and development of fame, the interplay between the cultural marketplace and the official culture of critics and the canon, and the relation between authorial agency and public appropriation. This introduction addresses these questions by approaching literary celebrity as a merging of two discursive constructions: the celebrity-function and the author-function. By combining insights from celebrity studies, literary history and cultural memory studies, the introduction conceptualizes literary celebrity as a discursive construction with several variables, such as the author’s self-presentation, the circulation of his public identity, changing opinions on literature and writership, and the public afterlife of the author’s image
Literary Stardom and Heavenly Gifts: Haruki Murakami (1949)
Full text linkFrom the volume's introduction: "That contemporary literary celebrity can be a global phenomenon is demonstrated by the example of Haruki Murakami. Globalization of literary production, Gaston Franssen reasons, has had major consequences for this author’s image: for instance, Murakami is frequently attacked in Japan by literary critics on account of the allegedly over-Western style and atmosphere that characterize his work, whereas he is frequently framed in Europe and the United States as an author who presents a penetrating analysis of Japanese culture. Intriguingly, Murakami boasts a broad fan base of loyal readers in both the West and in Japan, who will stand in line at bookstores for hours to buy his latest novel and who gather to share experiences at Murakami festivals. Franssen demonstrates that the author pits diffferent forms of literary authorship against each other in his work, expressing apparent criticism of the commercialization and mediatization of literature.
Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present
Full text linkThough these days, our celebrity culture tends to revolve around movie stars and pop musicians, there have been plenty of celebrity authors over the years and around the world. This volume brings together a number of contributors to look at how and why certain writers have attained celebrity throughout history. How were their images as celebrities constructed by themselves and in complicity with their fans? And how did that process and its effects differ from country to country and era to era
The Silence of the Celebrity: J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)
No full textAfter a youth spent in high-society circles and the incredible success of his debut novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), J.D. Salinger withdrew from the literary limelight. His reclusiveness, however, made him only more famous. His worldly withdrawal became an important trademark: it led to a constant stream of gossip and wild speculations about his life and work. After his death, Salinger’s literary stardom is undiminished and has even found its way into popular culture. This chapter traces the construction of the Salinger myth that informs the author’s public persona. The chapter argues that the author’s reticence intensified the semantic and affective potential of his public image: by closing himself off, Salinger opened his authorial persona up to a wide range of interpretations
Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature
No full textThis book maps the history of literary celebrity from the early nineteenth century to the present, paying special attention to the authors’ crafting of their writerly self as well as the afterlife of their public image. Case studies are John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Eliza Cook, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, J.D. Salinger and Zadie Smith
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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