This chapter turns to anxieties about the motivations of crusaders, focusing on the romance of Guy of Warwick. In fourteenth-century Europe, an ideology of “chivalric crusading” that sought to harmoniously combine courtly love, worldly self-advancement, and service to God gained wide popularity, disseminated by works such as Guillaume de Machaut’s La Prise d’Alixandre and the Livre des fais of Marshal Boucicaut. But this ideology was not without its critics: writers including John Gower, Philippe de Mézières, and Henry of Grosmont seized upon the notion of crusading as love-service to articulate complex critiques of the worldly ambitions of crusaders. Guy of Warwick intervenes in this debate by exploring the practical and experiential implications of fighting for worldly love and pious motives.

Chapter Ten analyzes Will Rogers the private individual. Looking at the real person behind the celebrity entertainer and writer, it focuses on several personal qualities that defined his adult life. He manifested a great loyalty to his wife, four children, and the idea of family. He maintained his rural roots, sustaining a lifelong attraction to riding and roping, horses and cattle that culminated in his beloved ranch domicile outside Los Angeles. He developed a cadre of close friends from the worlds of entertainment, journalism, and politics. Possessed of abundant nervous energy, he became addicted to travel, both nationally and globally. A man of common tastes in food, clothing, and entertainent, he nonetheless harbored an intense desire to succeed. At the deepest level, Rogers displayed a certain bifurcated quality: essentially reserved, earnest, moody, and sometimes ill-at-ease in private, but tranforming into a witty, charming entertainer and pundit when dealing with a group. Thus the private man balanced an authentic, common man persona with the popular, down-home, humorous image of "Will Rogers" that he crafted throughout his adult life.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

In ancient Greek culture of all periods, the notion of kleos is linked in a fundamental way to the poet’s voice, and no adequate discussion of that voice could ignore this topic. Itranslate kleos by ’fame’, ’glory’ or ’renown’, but some further glossing of this complex term is immediately necessary. Kleos is etymologically and semantically related to the verb kluo (’I hear’) – kleos is ’that which is heard’, ’a report’, even ’rumour’. So Telemachus, when he returns to Ithaca, asks Eumaeus for the kleos from town. Kleos is applied to what people talk (of), and an object like Nestor’s shield has a ’kleos which reaches heaven’, and heroes’ armour is often described as kluta (’with kleos’, ’talked of’). ’Things, places and persons acquire kleos as they acquire an identity in the human world, as stories are told about them.’

When Ilf and Petrov visited the recently completed Boulder Dam, they took surprisingly little notice of the workers or their working conditions. What troubled them was the fact that no one in America knew the names of those who constructed the “biggest dam in the world.” Chapter 21 argues that this failure to accord the builders their due provided Ilf and Petrov with a means of at once praising American technology and criticizing American capitalism. They contrasted Boulder Dam with an imagined Soviet Boulder Dam that would generate both electricity and heroes of socialist labor. Their tour guide at the dam, GE engineer Charles John Thomson, was well positioned to help them draw such comparisons. In charge of installing the generating turbines at Boulder Dam, he had received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for doing the same job at Dneprostroi.

Chapter 9 argues that Staël saw a Faustian bargain in Corinne ou l’Italie, took it, and paid the price; its triumphs and failures thus stand or fall together. What Staël gained was mythic power; what she lost was the ability to control its fate. Corinne’s political impact in Europe and America, standing as it does at the birth of modern nationalism, is both real and unquantifiable – witness the coinage nationalité, part of the larger impact of Staël’s ideas on national genius, reflected in Blackwood’s praise of her in 1818 as the creator of the science of nations. The novel’s esthetic impact on a century of readers is both fascinating and somewhat easier to assess, an invitation to future study already made in 1825 by Stendhal in a remark from Racine et Shakespeare: “Je ne vois réellement que Corinne qui ait acquis une gloire impérissable sans se modeler sur les anciens.”

Chapter Six focuses on T-Bone Slim (real name Matti Valentinepoika Huhta), a second-generation Finnish-American hobo who became the IWW’s most popular and influential writer. In hisnewspaper columns and songs, Slim represented the hobo not only as a worker, as Anderson had, but also as the revolutionary vanguard of a post-capitalist society. He parodies mainstream and conservative ideas about work, hobos, and the working class more generally. He challenges the common stereotype of hobos and tramps as being unintelligent through wit and verbal dexterity that assumes intelligence in his transient audience. He uses puns, neologisms and dynamic wordplay to involve his readers in the process of making meaning. In doing so, he creates a mode of literary genius that is communal rather than individualistic, and which in turn allows him to challenge mainstream understandings of literary success. The chapter shows how Slim brings his body and the bodies of his working-class readers into his writing by representing hunger as a defining class experience.

This chapter examines the relationship between Wallace’s writing and works of visual art. Beginning with the many moments of ekphrasis that punctuate the writing, ranging from myths of tapestry-weaving to Leutze’s mural of Manifest Destiny, encompassing Bernini and Escher in Infinite Jest alone, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace makes use of the language of images in his writing, situating narrative in conversation with visual culture and reaching beyond language to image, color and texture. Reflecting on prior scholarly attention to art positioned in Wallace’s writing, the chapter explores the connections between attention and aesthetic. The chapter also examines the ways in which visual cues appear in other ways in Wallace’s work, from the defecatory art of Brint Moltke in “The Suffering Channel” to the incidence of color as a motif throughout the work, specifically Wallace’s insistent references to clothing. The chapter highlights the materiality of these instances, attending to both the visual and the haptic elements of his narrative deployment of art in fictional worlds. This chapter works in concert with the next, delineating the intermediate nature of Wallace’s writing, poised between language, sense and image, and how his inclusion and occlusion of art recalibrate and reflect the relationships between author and reader.

Examining Hughes’s interest in Ebony magazine as a context informing his approach to writing at mid-century, this chapter explores the intersections aesthetically and politically between the landscape of popular journalism and Hughes’s work for the young. In Famous American Negroes (1954) and Famous Negro Music Makers (1955), Hughes combines photography and narrative to demonstrate the economic, political, and creative accomplishments of Black Americans. Hughes’s approach to the designation of “famous” as a marker of Black accomplishment corresponds to the method of Ebony in deploying public recognition and singularity as signs of civil rights progress, a strategic approach during the Cold War, during which straightforward assertions of dissatisfaction with American ideals could appear dangerous. By focusing on notoriety, Hughes picks up on the mode dominant in Ebony magazine but elaborates and complicates its tendencies. In the books’ depiction of music, Hughes articulates a resistant approach to the singularity of celebrity biography.

The idea that Auden should write a travel book occurred to him in the spring of 1936 after he had had lunch at Bryanston with Michael Yates, a former pupil from his days as a master at the Downs School. Yates reported that he was due to visit Iceland that summer as part of a small school trip, and, as he later recalled, Auden quickly became excited by the thought of the journey.1 His imagination had been stirred by thoughts of the North ever since his father had read the small boy Norse myths as bedtime stories. After some slightly tangled negotiations, Auden persuaded his publisher Faber to cover the costs of a trip, and he arranged with the teacher leading the excursion that they should meet while there: their experiences could form an element in the book that he had agreed to co-write with his friend Louis MacNeice. Auden took the boat from Hull sometime in mid-June, but as it happened MacNeice’s arrival was delayed until 9 August and the Bryanston party wasn’t scheduled to turn up till the 17, so Auden spent much of the time on his own, including the voyage out which took five or so tiresome days. He was not much taken with Reykjavik once disembarked: ‘Lutheran, drab and remote’ was his first impression.2 He spent a lonely week, with ‘nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence; at ruinous expense’, not greatly diverted by the task of correcting the proofs of his next volume of poems which Faber had sent through. But then he set out to explore the island with a guide, taking an anthropological interest in local phenomena such as cheese making and herring gutting, and his spirits rose (Prose, I. 256, 258).

W. H. Auden made it clear in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and various prose writings on Byron that what counted for him was the poet’s ‘voice’: ‘I like your muse because she’s gay and witty / […] / I like her voice that does not make me jump’.1 ‘Voice’ was no small matter for Auden, since as he famously declared in ‘September 1, 1939’ it was all he had ‘[t]o undo the folded lie’.2 Addressing Byron in the form of a verse-letter allowed him to find a new voice for himself. Within the context of Letters from Iceland, the format permitted him to talk on public matters while adopting the tone of a private communication; and, in addition, it allowed him to develop a broader conception of poetry’s scope, by finding in it a place for the non-earnest – something, as he saw it, that had been lost along the way in the development of poetry since Byron’s time. It gave a new direction to his own writing, preparing the way for the longer poems of the second half of his career.

In his social context, ‘peasant poet’ John Clare was not odd in being a constant reader of the ‘aristocrat poet’ Lord Byron. Even after the latter’s attacks in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers on ‘cobbler’ poets, along with all ‘sons of needless trade’ who might rhyme (‘weavers’, ‘taylors’, labourers with ‘plough’ or ‘spade’), Byron remained a leading influence on labouring-class poets’ work.1 Introducing his volume of labouring-class poetry of the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, Scott McEathron argues that along with Burns and Bloomfield, Byron loomed large for poor poets, including Clare:

She was 68, he was 24. Both hit the winter of 1812 with poetic heat that radiated into a future bereft of British self-recognition, importance and supremacy.

Jonson, as critics have long emphasised, frequently expressed disdain for popular taste and popular audiences. Yet he also chose to make a spectacle of himself before large crowds, most notably on his 1618 walk to Edinburgh. This essay explores Jonson’s conscious management of his reputation, even in its apparently negative aspects, during this unusual journey and through various publications from the Epigrams to the prologues, epilogues, inductions, choruses, and commentaries of the plays. Drawing on the conceptual framework of celebrity theory, it challenges traditional considerations of and assumptions about Jonson’s unpopularity.The essay argues that his displays of irascibility should be taken not at face value but as a conscious strategy through which he curated his image. Pursuing fame, but aware of the peril of being famous for the wrong reasons, Jonson creates the idea of the bad reader or spectator in order to manage his celebrity and forestall becoming a mere public commodity. His seeming hostility towards his audiences was not a self-cancelling rejection of them but, paradoxically, a way of managing and extending his celebrity.

In “Still Famous after All These Years: Ernest Hemingway in the Twenty-First Century,” Loren Glass offers a humorous overview of the way that Hemingway’s name has been franchised and flogged over the past two decades to sell an innumerable amount of products. He notes lawsuits that caused restaurants to change their name from Hemingway’s to Hemmingway’s to capitalize upon the writer’s appeal and catalogues the various tourist stops, from Ketchum Idaho to Key West Florida and Havana Cuba, that cash in on Hemingway’s fame. For Glass, commercial exploitation is no different than the scholarly commodification of the writer that has accelerated with the opening of various archives and museums over the past twenty years, as well as the Hemingway Letters Project, which ensures his pluripresence in American popular culture. Glass also notes how suicide and the struggles of fame have become a consistent narrative, leading to celebrity becoming a metatextual phenomenon in which people become famous for dramatizing their struggles with fame.

Kleos represents the “fame” of the hero as specifically transmitted through epic poetry, and functions as compensation for the hero’s untimely death. The Greek adjectives used to modify kleos in epic express its range and durability.