Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century
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A01=Brenda R. Weber
Alison Booth
Attention Deficit Disorder
author
Author_Brenda R. Weber
Bosom Friend
Category=DSBF
celebrity culture research
Charlotte Forten
Coarse Fingers
Currer Bell
Daphne Brooks
elizabeth
Elizabeth Keckley
Elizabeth Robins
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
famous
Famous Female Author
fanny
Fanny Fern
female
Female Genius
female literary identity
fern
Free Woman
gaskell
Gaskell Life
Gaskell's Representation
Gaskell’s Representation
gender and authorship
gendered fame in nineteenth-century literature
keckley
life
Literary Celebrity
Lucasta Miller
Mary Cholmondeley
Miching Mallecho
nineteenth-century women writers
Red Pottage
robins
Ruth Hall
Textual Baby
transatlantic literary studies
Vice Versa
Victorian biography analysis
White Violets
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781409400738
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 May 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.
Brenda R. Weber is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of English, Cultural Studies, Communication and Culture, and American Studies at Indiana University, USA.
