Introduction: Modernism and the Networks of Celebrity Construction

The essays collected in this section make key contributions to the rapidly expanding field of literary celebrity studies. Focusing on the moment of high early twentieth century modernity (1920s–1930s), the essays attend less to the embodied author’s often tortuous relation to the category of celebrity — the primary interest of pioneering works in the field, such as Loren Glass’s Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States (2004) and Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005) — and more to a concern with the construction of celebrity by closely networked markets, taste communities, forms of publicity, and media (radio, sound recordings, film, theatre, journalism, and literature). While not dismissing authorial agency, these essays, through their meticulous contextualizations of various interwar literary careers, sharpen our appreciation of how literary fame was shaped by the large-scale, interlocking forces of capitalist modernity.

The competitive dynamic of twentieth-century literary celebrity is the organizing concern of Faye Hammill’s “Noël Coward and the Sitwells: Enmity, Celebrity, Popularity.” The Sitwells and Coward, who engaged in a famous, decades-long feud, were placed and placed themselves amid opposing binaries modernist/popular; aristocratic/middle-class; eccentric/mainstream; difficult/accessible. While critics have generally accepted this set of distinctions, Hammill demonstrates the actual closeness of these writers. The common conception of both the Sitwells and Coward as brittle wits indicates the shared approaches and shared appeal of these nominally opposed representatives of avant-garde art and crowd-pleasing entertainment. Through deft and detailed comparisons of the creative works of Coward and the Sitwells, their self-fashioning efforts in autobiographies and correspondence, and their critical reception and publicity in magazines and newspaper columns, Hammill revises received understandings of these writers and makes an important contribution to the exploration of the intertwinement of avant-garde art and popular culture that has become a key strand within modernism studies.

The often surprising intimacies of modernism and entertainment are also a central feature of Lise Jaillant’s “ ‘Shucks, we’ve got glamour girls too!’: Gertrude Stein, Bennett Cerf and the Culture of Celebrity.” Building on Karen Leick’s discussion of the importance of Cerf, co-owner of the Modern Library and Random House, to Stein’s celebrity status, and drawing on a range of little-known archives, Jaillant demonstrates how Cerf ’s fascination with celebrity and his extensive network of contacts in the film industryenabled him to fashion Stein, during her 1934–35 publicity tour of the US, as a literary star equivalent to Hollywood stardom. This process is intriguingly epitomized in the media coverage of Stein’s relations with movie star Miriam Hopkins, which were stage-managed by Cerf. The 1934–35 tour built on Cerf ’s successful full-scale media marketing of a reprint of Stein’s Three Lives and her libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts, experimental works that were advertised as appealing to audiences seeking sheer entertainment. Outlining hitherto little-discussed aspects of Stein’s celebrity career, Jaillant increases our appreciation of the way in which the rigors of modernist writing were frequently aligned with commodified leisure.

In “The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars,” David Carter further demonstrates the confluences of “high” art and overtly commodified entertainment in this period. Through a forensic account of the approach and content of a number of mass market and commercially successful Australian magazines of the interwar period, Carter shows how modern celebrity and literary value, treated equally in those magazines, challenge current anachronistic characterizations of highbrow and lowbrow audiences and their interests. But while Carter demonstrates how these magazines indicate Australia’s participation in the promotion of international literary celebrities, the magazines were ultimately unable to establish homegrown celebrities who could compete with foreign ones. Carter argues that it was only after the war when new binary oppositions were established between culture and entertainment that Australian writing became a newly self-sufficient interest for readers. Carter thus offers an important local qualification of the increasingly familiar history of modern literary celebrity, even as his essay indicates the transnational dimension of early...