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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.
— Alison Booth, author of Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries
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
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
Come for Josiah Henson, stay for Frederika Bremer, and experience the joy of being in the company of an original mind the whole time.
— Mary L. Mullen, author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism
An intriguing study of the anarchic literary environment from which celebrity authors bloomed.
— Times Literary Supplement
Introduction: Antislavery Celebrity and the Literary Author
1. Cards on the Table: How Data-Driven Approaches to Literary History Shaped This Archive
2. The Collectible Author: Autographs, Homes and Haunts, and Antislavery Gift Books
3. White Lady Authoresses Cross the Atlantic: Antislavery Gift Books and Travelogues
4. Becoming the “Real Uncle Tom”: A Textual History of the Lives of Josiah Henson
5. A True History of Jane Eyre: The Collaborative Posthumous Creation of Charlotte Brontë
Coda: Refiguring Authorship
Notes
Bibliography
Index