Literary Popularity In Moran, Moran's 'Star Authors'

There are many forms of celebrity in contemporary popular culture, from rock stars and celebrity actors, to gardeners and celebrity chefs. The literary celebrity, a category that has existed in various guises at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has been receiving deeper engagement and more complex critical attention in recent years.

Until recently, the majority of cultural theorists writing on the subject of literary celebrities focussed on a distinction between traditional notions of fame, where a writer, for example, would be famous for their works and deeds, and celebrity, where someone is famous for themselves – for their own notoriety rather than personal achievement (Moran, 2000: 3; York, 2007: 8). In his ground-breaking

He argues that the specific nature during this period of the co-dependent, dialectical relationship between the mass market and high literature, and the feminisation of the literary marketplace that carried over from 19th-century attitudes to heterosexual romance and literary sensibilities, were pre-conditions for the emergence of a particular kind of literary celebrity. Notably, Glass employs a close, avowedly psychoanalytic method (2004:18) to analysing the celebrity status of several notable authors, in tandem with his discussion of the state of the American literary field at corresponding periods, emphasising the productive relationship between the celebrity author and the field in which the author operates. Similarly, Lorraine York’s (2007) research into Canadian literary celebrity explores the uneasy position of Canada’s literary field in relation to more dominant, or at least pervasive, American and European culture, establishing the Canadian celebrity author as negotiating these cultural, political and national concerns. While York’s work looks at the position of celebrity author across the literary field’s political and national tensions, whereas Glass explores the gendered and economic tensions he perceives as crucial to a particular period of American literary celebrity, they share Moran’s methodological belief that the celebrity author is necessarily implicated in and reproduces the tensions of the literary field in which the author is