"Beautiful Objects: Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity"
The editors seek essays for a proposed collection on women’s
commodification and celebrity prior to WWII. We have already had
preliminary conversations with a publisher who has expressed interest in
the volume.
What does it mean to be a woman celebrity? What happens when a woman
achieves both literary and personal fame? In what ways does a woman
writer become commodified, and how are those commodities publicized and
marketed? Are women writers commodified differently than men of the same
period?
Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Portraiture (or other ways by which a woman writer’s image is circulated):
portraits of authors; frontispieces; cartes de visite; other images of
the author: characteristic poses, etc.; engravings of sketches by friends;
miniatures for public consumption
Collectable objects: ceramics; display pieces; fairing boxes; plates;
clocks, etc
Ephemera, including collections of ephemera in albums; greeting cards;
playing cards; cigarette and other collectable cards; calendars, etc
Books: birthday books; books by others that play upon the fame of the
author: memoirs, collections of correspondence, etc; books by the authors
themselves marketed or reinvented so as to capitalize on celebrity;
exhibition, auction, or sale catalogs; attributions and pseudo-
authorship; autobiographies, diaries; non-literary published gossip
(i.e., gossip columns rather than book reviews); association or
presentation copies of the author’s work, including works used as school
prizes, etc.
Locations and Events: writer’s birthplaces; tombs;funerals /
anniversaries (of death, of birth); discussions of public performances
Associations and Naming: Clubs or reading groups named after famous woman
writer (may or may not actually focus on her work); Objects named after
famous writers: horses, ships, other non-literary, non-artistic objects;
Musical settings, songbooks, etc
The editors invite papers from a range of theoretical frameworks or
approaches, including but not limited to material or popular culture,
visual or print culture, etc.
500-word abstracts (or full papers) due by September 1, 2007 to both
editors: Maura Ives, m-ives at tamu.edu, and Ann R. Hawkins, ann.hawkins
at ttu.edu. Please send attachments as .doc or .rtf files, or paste the
abstract into the body of an email.
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