Authorship, Activism and Celebrity

Since long before the age of celebrity activism, literary authors have used their public profiles and cultural capital to draw attention to a wide range of socio-political concerns. This book is the first to explore - through history, criticism and creative interventions - the relationship between authorship, political activism and celebrity culture across historical periods, cultures, literatures and media. It brings together scholars, industry stakeholders and prominent writer-activists to engage in a conversation on literary fame and public authority. These scholarly essays, interviews, conversations and opinion pieces interrogate the topos of the artist as prophet and acute critic of the analyse the ideological dimension of literary celebrity; and highlight the fault lines between public and private authorial selves, ''pure'' art, political commitment and marketplace imperatives. In case studies ranging from the 18th century to present-day controversies, authors illuminate the complex relationship between literature, politics, celebrity culture and market activism, bringing together vivid current debates on the function and responsibility of literature in increasingly fractured societies.>

Auteur
Sandra Mayer is a literary and cultural historian at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences). Her research focuses on life writing, authorship and celebrity, transnational encounters and reception processes. She is the author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna (2018) and has (co-)edited several books and special issues, including Life Writing and Celebrity (2019) and 'Life Writing and the Transnational' (2022), a special issue for Comparative Critical Studies.Ruth Scobie has taught English literature at the Universities of York, Sheffield and Oxford. She is the author of Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania in Britain 1770-1823 (2019). Her research traces the links between British culture and ideas of race and difference in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century empire, most recently focusing on fictional representations of celebrity in novels of the period.