The Rise of Celebrity Authorship

Sarah Allison's The Rise of Celebrity Authorship is as good at mapping the tributaries of alternate literary histories as at navigating the international waters of Abolitionism and literary celebrity. The succinct and wide-ranging chapters build an inclusive chorus of print culture, digital textual analysis, and critical heritage to dramatize the afterlives and reception, both fictional and fact-based, of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the ""real Uncle Tom"" Josiah Henson, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë as well as Mary Howitt, translator of the Swedish novelist Frederika Bremer, who indicted sugar production in Cuba, among others. Marginalized genres marketed fables of intimacy, freedom, and authentic originals: homes and haunts and travel writing; autographs snipped and woodcut; gift books fundraising for a cause; raunchy fanfiction. -- Alison Booth, author of <i>Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries</i> Through a deft blend of computational analysis and close reading, Sarah Allison shows how the figure of the celebrity author was produced collectively and mobilized politically in transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture. Her account of the interplay of fiction and reality in the construction of literary celebrity—in the nineteenth century and today—is especially revelatory. -- Daniel Hack, author of <i>Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature</i> Using computational analysis of canonical authors and marginal figures of the nineteenth century, Allison argues that celebrity authorship arose not from effort or literariness alone but within and against what she terms a “constellation” of miscellaneous nonfiction texts. Her innovative work expands the cultural landscape of antislavery literary study. -- Ivonne M. García, author of <i>Gothic Geocultures: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cuba in the Transamerican Imaginary</i>