The Rise of Celebrity Authorship - by Sarah Danielle Allison

About the Book

Sarah Danielle Allison illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within the anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace.

Book Synopsis

Literary celebrity in the nineteenth century emerged from a miscellaneous array of trending print forms, including antislavery writing, which was a popular, consumable form of literature in the period. Antislavery print culture could function as a pop culture, leveraging cultural myths about gender and authorship through print forms that connected readers with writers: printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers' homes, autobiography, biography, and travel writing. The Rise of Celebrity Authorship traces surprising relations among figures and across shared forms in the period: What do antislavery forms and figures tell us about literary celebrity and the networks of transatlantic print culture?

Sarah Danielle Allison illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within this anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Bringing together book history with more recent computational approaches, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship shifts focus from the conventional literary work of major writers to the breadth of print forms circulating around them. Allison considers a variety of texts adjacent to the novel, including Edgar Allan Poe's satire of autograph collecting, antislavery gift books, and a Southern travelogue by the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer. She draws striking parallels between two starkly different 1858 texts: Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë, which sought to unearth the reality behind Jane Eyre, and Josiah Henson's autobiography, which circulated as the life of the "original Uncle Tom." A rich account of the competing and complementary forces that shape images of authors, this book reveals the collaborative work of literary production and celebrity.

Review Quotes

Allison's The Rise of Celebrity Authorship is as good at mapping the tributaries of alternate literary histories as at navigating the international waters of abolitionism and literary celebrity. This wide-ranging book builds an inclusive chorus of print culture, digital textual analysis, and critical heritage to dramatize the afterlives and reception, both fictional and fact-based, of Harriet Beecher Stowe; the "real Uncle Tom," Josiah Henson; Elizabeth Gaskell; and Charlotte Brontë, as well as Mary Howitt, translator of the Swedish novelist Frederika Bremer, who indicted sugar production in Cuba, among others.--Alison Booth, author of Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries

Through a deft blend of computational analysis and close reading, Allison shows how the figure of the celebrity author was produced collectively and mobilized politically in transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture. Her account of the interplay of fiction and reality in the construction of literary celebrity--in the nineteenth century and today--is especially revelatory.--Daniel Hack, author of Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Using computational analysis of canonical authors and marginal figures of the nineteenth century, Allison argues that celebrity authorship arose not from effort or literariness alone but within and against what she terms a "constellation" of miscellaneous nonfiction texts. Her innovative work expands the methdology of antislavery literary study.--Ivonne M. García, author of Gothic Geocultures: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cuba in the Transamerican Imaginary

About the Author

Sarah Danielle Allison is an associate professor of English and Hutchinson Distinguished Professor at Loyola University New Orleans. She is the author of Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (2018).