Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars

Faye Hammill

Published by University of Texas Press 2007

Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars

Faye Hammill

In the series Literary Modernism

https://doi.org/10.7560/716445

Overview
Contents

About this book

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon—celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers—Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield—who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today.

Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers—as well as their gender—affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination.

The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

Author / Editor information

Faye Hammill is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. “How to tell the diff erence between a Matisse painting and a Spanish omelette”: Dorothy Parker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. “Brains are really everything”: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
3. “A plumber’s idea of Cleopatra”: Mae West as Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
4. “Astronomers located her in the latitude of Prince Edward Island”: L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, and Early Hollywood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
5. “The best product of this century”: Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
6. “Literature or just sheer fl apdoodle?”: Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
7. “Wildest hopes exceeded”: E. M. Delafi eld’s Diary of a Provincial Lady Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 271

eBook

Published: December 3, 2009
ISBN: 9780292794870