Literary Celebrity in Canada/Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".