Literary Celebrity in Canada/Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars

Lorraine York, Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), viii + 200pp. Cased. £25. ISBN 978-0-8020-9282-9. Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), viii + 320pp. Cased. £25. ISBN 978-0-2927-1644-5. Lorraine York and Faye Hammill offer engaging and intellectual explorations of literary celebrity. Their monographs offer complementary investigations of the phenomenon of literary celebrity, expanding the concept beyond the boundaries indicated by earlier scholars. As such, both books are highly recommended to scholars and students of Canadian literature. York focuses exclusively on Canadian literature; Hammill ranges more widely in geographical terms, whilst focusing more narrowly on the timeframe of the interwar period. Her study features Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield. In contrast, York's book is divided between discussions of a range of early literary celebrities - Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, and, like Hammill, L. M. Montgomery - and a longer analysis of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields in the second half of the book. York surveys a range of theoretical positions on celebrity, from the emptiness theory to the tension between public and private versions of the individual, as well as exploring the differences between film stars and their literary counterparts. Her methodology required her to re-evaluate sources which her academic history had taught her to set side: magazine profiles, publishing figures, advertisements and journalistic sources. Nevertheless, her book is far from unacademic, as it engages with troubling questions over what constitutes celebrity. Hammill similarly notes her need to look to other sources - including obituaries - for her in-depth cultural history. York dismisses the fallacy of the self-effacing Canadian, and shows that literary celebrity (even 'stardom') and performance are intimately related. Pauline Johnson, whose celebrity included performances of ethnicity, is offered an early example of this linkage. York then explores the celebrity fate of Stephen Leacock, whose literary reputation now fares less well than Johnson's or Montgomery's does. Mazo de la Roche's celebrity is addressed through the contest between critical approval and popularity with fans, the latter of which eventually superseded the former. York investigates tourism in her exploration of L. M. Montgomery, assessing the way in which her celebrity lives on not only through her books, but through the deliberate construction of 'Green Gables' as a tourist site. In the chapters that follow, York offers longer case studies. She explores Atwood's uneasy celebrity, as well as the backlash against it. She argues that Ondaatje's determination to reject celebrity ironically feeds interest in him as an individual as well as a writer. She reads his desire for privacy more complexly than others, suggesting that it is both overplayed (in reference to his writing habits) and underplayed (in relation to his complex, if not contradictory, association with the Minghella film). …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.