Literary Celebrity In Canada

In recent years, Canadian authors have enjoyed tremendous international success, writing novels that become Oscar-nominated films or achieve coveted success as selections for the Oprah Winfrey bookclub. Literary Celebrity in Canada is the first extended study of the dynamics of celebrity in the field of Canadian literature. Building on the argument that celebrity is a phenomenon firmly embraced by mainstream culture, Lorraine York examines it in relation to various tensions and conflicts within the literary community and beyond. Using as examples three contemporary literary celebrities, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields, and four earlier popular writers, Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, and L.M. Montgomery, York demonstrates that individual authors respond differently to fame in ways that can be contradictory and complex. She casts doubt on the notion of a specifically Canadian response to fame. Depending on the public interpretation of a particular writer's life and work, different tensions arise in negotiating literary celebrity. Privacy versus publicity; swift success versus laborious apprenticeship; national versus international association, or ownership of the celebrity - no single version of celebrity applies to all. Citizenship, however, is a remarkably consistent site of tension for stars, literary or otherwise. Like citizenship, celebrity marks an uneasy space wherein the single, special individual and the group demographic both meet and separate. Literary Celebrity in Canada explores that space, drawing on current theories of celebrity and questioning their tendency to view fame as an empty phenomenon. This study is an innovative attempt to understand the psychology of literary stardom and will influence future research on contemporary literature and popular culture.

For every famous author there is a score of individuals working behind the scenes to promote and maintain her celebrity status. This timely and thoughtful book considers the particular case of internationally renowned writer Margaret Atwood and the active agents working in concert with her, including her assistants and office staff, her publicists, her literary agents, and her editors. Lorraine York explores the ways in which the careers of famous writers are managed and maintained and the extent to which literary celebrity creates a constant tension in these writers' lives between the need of solitude for creative purposes and the give-and-take of the business of being a writer of significant public stature. Making extensive use of unpublished material in the Margaret Atwood Papers at the University of Toronto, York demonstrates the extent to which celebrity writers must embrace and protect themselves from the demands of the literary world, including by participating in – or even inventing – new forms of technology that facilitate communication from a slight remove. This informative study calls overdue attention to the ways in which literary celebrity is the result not only of a writer's creativity and hard work, but also of an ongoing collaborative effort among professionals to help maintain the writer's place in the public eye.

Celebrity Cultures in Canada is an interdisciplinary collection that explores celebrity phenomena and the ways they have operated and developed in Canada over the last two centuries. The chapters address a variety of cultural venues—politics, sports, film, and literature—and examine the political, cultural, material, and affective conditions that shaped celebrity in Canada and its uses both at home and abroad. The scope of the book enables the authors to highlight the trends that characterize Canadian celebrity—such as transnationality and bureaucracy—and explore the regional, linguistic, administrative, and indigenous cultures and institutions that distinguish fame in Canada from fame elsewhere. In historicizing and theorizing Canada’s complicated cultures of celebrity, Celebrity Cultures in Canada rejects the argument that nations are irrelevant in today’s global celebrityscapes or that Canada lacks a credible or adequate system for producing, distributing, and consuming celebrity. Nation and national identities continue to matter—to celebrities, to fans, and to institutions and industries that manage and profit from celebrity systems—and Canada, this collection argues, has a vibrant, powerful, and often complicated and controversial relationship to fame.

The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the literary - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.

The Metaphor of Celebrity is an exploration of the significance of literary celebrity in Canadian poetry. It focuses on the lives and writing of four widely recognized authors who wrote about stardom -- Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Irving Layton, and Gwendolyn MacEwen -- and the specific moments in Canadian history that affected the ways in which they were received by the broader public. Joel Deshaye elucidates the relationship between literary celebrity and metaphor in the identity crises of celebrities, who must try to balance their public and private selves in the face of considerable publicity. He also examines the ways in which celebrity in Canadian poetry developed in a unique way in light of the significant cultural events of the decades between 1950 and 1980, including the Massey Commission, the flourishing of Canadian publishing, and the considerable interest in poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, which was followed by a rapid fall from public grace, as poetry was overwhelmed by greater popular interest in Canadian novels." -- Publisher website.

A first of its kind, The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature provides an overview of Comparative North American Literature, a cutting-edge discipline. Contributors make important interventions into multiculturalism in North America and into U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border literatures.

An important critical study of Canadian literature, placing internationally successful anglophone Canadian authors in the context of their national literary history. While the focus of the book is on twentieth-century and contemporary writing, it also charts the historical development of Canadian literature and discusses important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. The chapters focus on four central topics in Canadian culture: Ethnicity, Race, Colonisation; Wildernesses, Cities, Regions; Desire; and Histories and Stories. Each chapter combines case studies of five key texts with a broad discussion of concepts and approaches, including postcolonial and postmodern reading strategies and theories of space, place and desire. Authors chosen for close analysis include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, Thomas King and Carol Shields.

The first collection of critical essays devoted to the study of English-Canadian literary anthologies brings together the work of thirteen prominent critics to investigate anthology formation in Canada and answer these key questions: Why are there so many literary anthologies in Canada, and how can we trace their history? What role have anthologies played in the formation of Canadian literary taste? How have anthologies influenced the training of students from generation to generation? What literary values do the editors of various anthologies tend to support, and how do these values affect canon formation in Canada? How have different genres fared in the creation of literary anthologies? How do Canadian anthologies transmit ideas about gender, region, ideology, and nation? Specific essays focus on anthologies as national metaphors, the controversies surrounding early literary collections, representations of First Nations peoples in anthologies, and the ways in which various editors have understood exploration narratives. In addition, the collection examines the representation of women in Canadian anthologies, the use of anthologies as teaching tools, and the creation of some very odd Canadian anthologies along the way.