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This chapter examines a Chinese literary celebrity from each of the past three decades—Wang Meng (b. 1934), Wang Shuo (b. 1958), and Wei Hui (b. 1974)—to show how developments in the literary field have transformed the nature of celebrity in China today. It begins with a brief discussion of the context and social value of literary production during the socialist, Maoist period (1949–76). It then discusses each of the literary celebrities in turn, moving from the eldest, Wang Meng, through to the youngest, Wei Hui, with a focus on different aspects of literary celebrity culture. Finally, it examines the impacts of Wang Meng, Wang Shuo, and Wei Hui on the broader literary cultures of their times.

This chapter uses Herta Müller's Nobel Prize win to explore issues of authorship and celebrity. Focusing on how Müller has been perceived as both an intensely private individual and a broadly representative figure, it considers how the author's physical body relates to her literary corpus: the author's ‘two bodies’. Celebrity theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu are adapted to show how a literary author who is subject to sudden and sustained media attention (‘celebrification’) repeatedly finds one body substituted for the other in the multiple value systems into which she is inserted. Teasing out how this happens in the months from September to December 2009, this chapter invites the reader to reflect on wider processes of consumption surrounding literature and individual intellectual achievement. The aims are twofold: to encourage further sustained analysis of Müller's literary authorship within a complex media context, and to consider how the strategies she has developed in response to various public constructions of her authorial person may modify current understandings of literary celebrity.

Long before the post-mortem biography, information about authors now emerges through a range of life-writing texts (interviews, profiles, photographs, TV appearances) which have traditionally been classed as ephemera and judged unworthy of serious attention. But however ephemeral the marketing of literature might seem, in this period major shifts in the publishing industry and the mass media caused the background activity of authorial self-promotion to lurch embarrassingly onto the main stage, where it exerts a strange trivializing power. In the convergence between high culture and consumerist celebrity culture older ways of understanding literary seriousness became increasingly hollowed out and even debunked, and the question as to how—or even whether—that seriousness might be reimagined became a very open one. This chapter compares some of the ways in which writers in this period have contended with the power of celebrity to neutralize their work, including Samuel Beckett, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Karl Ove Knausgård.

This chapter examines a key period in the growth and development of Time and Tide highlighted by its size and price increase in 1928. Exploring Time and Tide’s increased use of illustration, the relationships it developed with a new set of advertisers, and a strategic alliance it forged with the Nation and Athenaeum, the chapter shows how this modern magazine capitalised on contemporary debates about the future of the press and successfully rebranded itself as a leading general-audience weekly review competitive with the New Statesman. The chapter further argues that Time and Tide’s increased emphasis on books following its ‘literary turn’ in 1928 was a key strategy in moving the magazine out of the ‘women’s paper’ category and into the ranks of the intellectual weeklies. At the same, its participation in the cultures of literary celebrity continued to serve a feminist agenda in its promotion of women writers (modernist and middlebrow) as well as the work of female critics such as the periodical’s own director and contributor Rebecca West.

This concluding chapter considers the continuing importance of Thomas Mann in the world republic of letters. It explains how the parameters that conditioned Mann's rise to the status of literary celebrity and antifascist icon in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s foreshadowed developments in the world republic of letters. These developments, moreover, did not fully come to fruition until after the Second World War. Furthermore, they continue to affect global literary production in the twenty-first century. In many respects, Thomas Mann was a forerunner for experiences that have become commonplace for writers in our own day, especially those that hail from the periphery of the global literary community.

In this essay, Ceylan Kosker explores how Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie (1843‒1905) used her poetry publications in the Lady’s Realm, ‘On the Marmora’ (1896) and ‘A Deserted Village’ (1897), to address the Hamidian Massacres, which took place in the Ottoman Empire, 1894‒96. As an aristocrat and wife of a British ambassador, Currie had to be careful in her treatment of political subject matter. Thus, she not only adopted a pseudonym, Violet Fane, but also published her political poems in a women’s magazine rather than in a mixed-gender monthly or quarterly magazine. She employed a number of strategies that aimed to hint at the topicality of her subject matter, yet she also obscured her political aims by aestheticising images of violence (in tandem with accompanying illustrations) and by emphasising her own public identity. Publishing political poetry in the Lady’s Realm thus ‘allowed her to express the haunting quality of the trauma she suffered from witnessing the Armenian atrocities without damaging her reputation as a literary celebrity’ (p. 526).

This first of two chapters on The Satanic Verses discusses Salman Rushdie’s conflicted status as a critic of state racism and a feted literary celebrity that criticized multiculturalism. Beginning with his quarrel with Stuart Hall over the political and aesthetic commitments of ‘black’ art in 1987, it then shifts to two key sources shaping Rushdie’s early polemical essays and the London sections of The Satanic Verses: racism as an intellectual problem rooted in white society as discussed in Ann Dummett’s A Portrait of English Racism (1973), and the migrant underclass Rushdie encountered through the grassroots Camden Committee for Community Relations. The chapter concludes by tracing the emerging tensions between Rushdie’s idea of an anti-racist critical practice and his evolving commitment to free literary expression.

What is the extent, and what are the limits, of the role played by the figure of Jean Marot in the experience of social hierarchy that his son Clément’s poetry communicates? ‘Experience’ is understood here in a broad sense, including for example personal relationships, events, possessions, emotions, imaginings, memories, and the very attempt to make sense of all that. Much of Clément’s poetry is autobiographical in the sense that its force relies on the reader accepting that it is rooted in the poet’s experience. However, in the forms in which it was printed in the period it was not autobiographical in the sense of inviting the reader to construct a precise record of a life. Its aim seems rather to have been to maximize the relevance, to different readers, of a singular experience of social hierarchy, to communicate one celebrity’s adventures on the social ladder, but also something more.