Marketing the Author

ELT 49 : 2 2006 Marketing the Author Marysa Demoor, ed. Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. xiv+ 239 pp. $65.00 AS ITS TITLE should make immediately obvious, Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning is indebted at least partially to New Historicist criticism, particularly as practiced by Stephen Greenblatt. That indebtedness manifests itself in this varied collection in a number of ways. It attends on occasion to particular practices of reading that today appear a little anachronistic. The first essay particularly, by Elizabeth Mansfield on Emilia Dilke, seems unnecessarily wedded to an imitation of early Greenblatt that had this reader wondering "why?" More often, however, and in these instances more successfully, the majority of essays brought together by editor Marysa Demoor respect and respond to the spirit of the nolonger -new New Historicism without adhering slavishly to its tenets or protocols. Offering frequently inventive insights and interventions into a range of canonical and marginal or occluded authors from the fifty-year period 1880-1930, those essays maintain a historicist rigour while being attentive to the more complex nuances of textual form and structure. In this they depart from the shadow of what in retrospect proved to be a somewhat monolithic and intransigent, not to say insensitive , critical methodology. The ten chapters address the fashioning of authorial identities by Dilke, Henry James, W. T. Stead ("the high priest of new journalism"), Lucas Malet (Charles Kingsley's daughter), George Moore, Vernon Lee, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Robins. While the critical receptions and fortunes of these authors have varied wildly, thereby providing in the present volume a timely, if not long-overdue, intercession and recuperation on a number of occasions, it is arguably the case that, of the authors considered , only James steps forward as a figure immediately recognisable as having been engaged in the "self-fashioning" of his authorial persona . Thus Marketing the Author does double service: for not only does it rescue particular writers from obscurity or otherwise undeserved languishing as footnotes to cultural studies' assessments of the fin de siècle or the Edwardian period, it also reconceives and thus historicises the author's sense of self and the promotion of that self in an increasingly commodified book market. 242 BOOK reviews More than this, however, in tracing several cultural trajectories, from late Victorianism to modernism, from high art to yellow journalism, through the work of close and careful reading of the market forces and cultural imperatives that served to generate notions of authorship as role and narrative invention, the volume—successfully on the whole— transforms conventional reception of the literary landscape. The boundaries between modernism and other genres of Edwardian writing begin to disappear, as do those guidelines that, in more or less sophisticated ways, have mapped in critical language a trajectory of linear progression from the classic realist text, through the naturalist, to the modernist . The phenomenology of genre is shown effectively to deconstruct itself and so to dismantle long-held critical commonplaces, when recast according to the internally heterogeneous trope of authorial and narrative identity formation in all its materiality and historicity. Marketing the Author is to be both applauded and warmly welcomed by those critics who have felt dissatisfied at seeing the period in question as merely a period of transition. For those readers no longer interested in artificial divisions and periodization, but rather intent on addressing cultural forces that determine the perception and shaping of the artist beyond the obvious and limited projection of the writer as decadent aesthete in the period in question, the international group of scholars offers a necessary reorientation to notions of the self and literary subjectivity . Marketing the Author does a number of things and it does them very well. Departing from a vision of the Victorian book market at its zenith, the essays address the ways in which the perceived gap between the reading public and intellectuals was, if not overcome completely, then at least bridged or surveyed in a number of ways. In speaking to these issues the authors in the volume, especially in chapters concerning...