Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism: Fictions of Celebrity

Contemporary celebrity authors position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction. This book argues that marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation, contributing to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature. It proposes a materialist history of modernisms afterlives to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 24 August 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Celebrity authors such as Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride, and Anna Burns have positioned their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction. This book also demonstrates how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised.

While this is a compelling thesis and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Celebrity authors such as Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride, and Anna Burns have positioned their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction. This book also demonstrates how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised.

While this is a compelling thesis and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Celebrity authors such as Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride, and Anna Burns have positioned their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction. This book also demonstrates how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised.

While this is a compelling thesis and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350248601