Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism

Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism PDF Author: Carey Mickalites
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350248576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism

Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism PDF Author: Carey Mickalites
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350248584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity

Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity PDF Author: Aaron Jaffe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521843010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
In this 2005 book, Jaffe examines the interactions of modernist literary fame and celebrity culture in the early twentieth century.

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing PDF Author: Paige Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198881053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

Modernist Star Maps

Modernist Star Maps PDF Author: Aaron Jaffe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351916874
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Book Description
Bringing together Canadian, American, and British scholars, this volume explores the relationship between modernism and modern celebrity culture. In support of the collection's overriding thesis that modern celebrity and modernism are mutually determining phenomena, the contributors take on a range of transatlantic canonical and noncanonical figures, from the expected (Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the surprising (Elvis and Hitler). Illuminating case studies are balanced by the volume's attentiveness to broader issues related to modernist aesthetics, as the contributors consider celebrity in relationship to identity, commodification, print culture, personality, visual cultures, and theatricality. As the first book to read modernism and celebrity in the context of the crises of individual agency occasioned by the emergence of mass-mediated culture, Modernist Star Maps argues that the relationship between modernism and the popular is unthinkable without celebrity. Moreover, celebrity's strange evolution during the twentieth century is unimaginable without the intercession of modernism's system of cultural value. This innovative collection opens new avenues for understanding celebrity not only for modernist scholars but for critical theorists and cultural studies scholars.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature PDF Author: Ulrika Maude
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780936559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Book Description
In this book, leading international scholars explore the major ideas and debates that have made the study of modernist literature one of the most vibrant areas of literary studies today. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to current research in the field, covering topics including: · The modernist everyday: emotion, myth, geographies and language scepticism · Modernist literature and the arts: music, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture · Textual and archival approaches: manuscripts, genetic criticism and modernist magazines · Modernist literature and science: sexology, neurology, psychology, technology and the theory of relativity · The geopolitics of modernism: globalization, politics and economics · Resources: keywords and an annotated bibliography

Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity

Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity PDF Author: Jonathan Goldman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292744042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity. Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

Writing Celebrity

Writing Celebrity PDF Author: T. Galow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Writing Celebrity is divided into three major sections. The first part traces the rise of a national celebrity culture in the United States and examines the impact that this culture had on "literary" writing in the decades before World War II. The second two sections of the book demonstrate the relevance of celebrity for literary scholarship by re-evaluating the careers of two major American authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

Authors Inc.

Authors Inc. PDF Author: Loren Glass
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814731597
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States, Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed. Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuses on how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship. By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.

Institutions of Modernism

Institutions of Modernism PDF Author: Lawrence S. Rainey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300070507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
This account of modernism and its place in public culture looks at where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences. The individual tales of figures like Joyce, Pound, Marinetti and Eliot provide perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself.