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Signs of Intimacy: The Literary Celebrity in the “Age of Interviewing”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard Salmon
Richard Salmon
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Extract

In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, and distinctively modern, fate of the artist as celebrity. Besieged by journalists, lionizers, and autograph-hunters, the celebrated writer is subjected to a voracious desire for knowledge concerning his life, whilst, conversely, the work, upon which his literary fame supposedly rests, is neglected. The work of the author is displaced from its position as the privileged object of literary interpretation by a proliferation of new cultural practices which construe the “life” as a more vital source of meaning. Through such media as advertising, journalism and photography, authors, like the texts which they produce, are marketed as commodities, as products to be circulated and consumed.

Type
Works in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 159 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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