Refashioning the Literary Celebrity: Nineteenth-Century American Authors and their British Readers in Transatlantic Print Culture

My thesis investigates the dynamic processes by which the figure of the American literary celebrity was refashioned through reciprocal, transatlantic cultural exchanges between the United States and England. Although transnational elements of literary celebrity culture have received critical attention in recent years, I aim to extend current theoretical frameworks by moving attention from author-oriented approaches of how literary celebrity was fashioned to focus instead on the way that complex interplays among writers, readers, and the market together shaped the public image of the literary celebrity. In particular, I use the term ‘refashioning’ to argue that this participatory aspect of popular authorial personae formation served as an expressive vehicle through which localised concerns could be articulated, reframed and circulated transatlantically.
Analysing understudied texts and archival materials, I focus on the way that the public images of four literary celebrities, Fanny Fern, Josiah Henson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman, were shaped by transatlantic print culture and British readers. In the first part of my thesis, I explore the relationship between authors and their literary ‘brands’. By tracing the circulation of Fern’s literary brand in American and British markets, I explain the challenges imposed on celebrity authors like Fern who attempted to stabilise the dissemination of their public image. I investigate the role of the transatlantic market in shaping the American literary celebrity by analysing the way Henson’s designation as the ‘original Uncle Tom’ was appropriated to bolster British nationalistic pride among juvenile readers. Turning to the responses of British readers to American authors, I examine the way the little-known British poet William Cox Bennett exploited Longfellow’s celebrity status in England to promote transatlantic Anglo-Saxon kinship. Finally, I investigate how a group of working- and middle-class men in Bolton used Whitman’s comradeship to create personal and comradely bonds among themselves.