Introduction: Starring the Author

Literary 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.