Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity by Lorraine York (review)

This book offers a refreshingly new perspective on Margaret Atwood as York shifts the focus from Atwood the individual 'star text' of Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007) to the cultural industry that sustains and manages her celebrity status as bestselling writer, Canadian citizen and public intellectual. Though Atwood is, as she acknowledged in 2011, the 'primary source' for the Atwood industry ('The Publishing Pie', p. 27), York's innovative approach analyses the collaborative labour of the personnel behind that celebrity image: literary agents, editors, publishers, researchers and the Toronto office staff at O.W. Toad, all of whom mediate between the creative writer and the demands of international fame. However, York does not underrate Atwood's active interventions in managing her celebrity, notably her increasing engagement with various forms of electronic and social media, which serendipitously coincides with her SF MaddAddam trilogy (2003-13).

Book design here reflects the comprehensive scope of York's inquiry as it moves from 'the office, to social media, to literary texts' in its persuasive argument that 'the agents of literary celebrity go far beyond the individual and personal' (p. 26). The first three chapters examine the respective roles of Atwood's agents and assistants, offering lively intimate profiles of the individual women involved. Drawing on archival sources at the University of Toronto, York outlines the extensive collaboration between author and agents at every stage of book production after the initial draft. The emphasis is always on Atwood's professionalism and her astute business sense. (She was, after all, the first Canadian writer to incorporate herself as a company back in the mid-1970s.) Chapter 4, '@MargaretAtwood: Interactive Media and the Management of Literary Celebrity', is particularly intriguing with its investigation of Atwood's uncanny insight into publishing trends and her clever use of new electronic tools to negotiate literary celebrity in the context of globalised cultural production and marketing. Since the multimedia launch of The Year of the Flood in 2009 when Atwood began blogging and tweeting during her promotional book tour with international public performances in seven countries, she has become an interactive technology trendsetter, even winning the Innovator's Award at the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Not only does York assess this reconfiguring of a celebrity image via social media and digital publishing, but in the final chapter she also scrutinises the uneasy relation between creativity, fame and commerce, drawing her evidence from Atwood's own fictional and non-fictional writings about celebrity. The chapter concludes with a fascinating assessment of Atwood's ongoing reappraisal of the relation between new technologies and print culture foregrounded in the first two books of her sf trilogy. (With the third volume now published - and available on Kindle - Atwood springs a narrative trap that reopens that debate.)

This immensely readable book manages to position one exceptional writer's career as the model for an in-depth study of the social production of art and celebrity. It makes a valuable contribution to Atwood scholarship and to studies in related areas of authorship, book publishing and marketing.