York - Literary Celebrity in Canada

LITERARY CELEBRITY IN CANADA

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 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 writers 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.

LORRAINE YORK is the Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

LORRAINE YORK

University of Toronto Press 2007

Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.

Reprinted in paperback 2017

ISBN 978-0-8020-9282-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2139-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

York, Lorraine M. (Lorraine Mary), 1958-Literary celebrity in Canada / Lorraine York.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9282-3 (bound) ISBN 978-1-4875-2139-4 (paperback)

1. Authorship Social aspects Canada History 20th century. 2. Authors, Canadian (English) 20th century Biography. 3. Celebrities Canada Biography. 4. Authors and readers Canada History 20th century. 5. Literature and society Canada History 20th century. I. Title.

PS8061.Y67 2007 C810.9005 C2007-901359-7

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

I have been the beneficiary of so many peoples expertise, advice, good will, and patience from the very beginning of this project. Many thanks to Melanie Holmes, working on a Student Assistantship Bursary at McMaster, for doing the start-up research that allowed me to apply for a SSHRC Standard Research Grant, and to anonymous colleagues who thought the project was deserving of SSHRC support. Because of that support, I was blessed with the most generous and hard-working research assistant one could ever ask for: Kate Higginson. The broad spectrum of sources, from scholarly book to newspaper to internet, drawn upon in this book appears thanks to Kates meticulous work. Kate: thank you; I always said the trick would be to produce a book worthy of your contributions.

Colleagues and friends have been kind and generous in their support of this project: Sarah Brophy, the soul of collegiality, emailed me source information on Australian fame; Robert Lecker and the people at Essays on Canadian Writing let me meander on about this topic in its very early stages in their twentieth-anniversary issue. The chairs of my department of English and cultural studies, first Don Goellnicht and now Mary OConnor, have been unstinting in their support for all of the research of department memebers. Thanks to Neil McLaughlin, Department of Sociology at McMaster, for reading sections of the manuscript and offering perceptive feedback. Colleagues Daniel Coleman, Ron Granofsky, Grace Kehler, and Peter

Walmsley inspire me; they are a delight to work with and learn from. So are the graduate students I have had the honour to teach in Celebrity/Culture for the past three years: Nick Buffo, Heather Colpitts, Brady Curlew, Karen Espiritu, Andrew Griffin, Mandy Koolen, Dana Woloschuk, Katrine Raymond, Suzanne Rintoul, Jana Roloson, Lesley Steeve, Scott Stoneman, Bonnie Wong, Robin Chamberlain, Liz Harmer, Wafa Hasan, Paul Huebener, Krista Levely, Dilia Narduzzi, Christy OConnor, Jason Phillips, Kevin Pighin, Colleen Court, Jeremy Sullivan, Jillaine Tuininga, Jessica Carey, Meagan Dallimore, Liat Dobrishman, William Edwards, Sarah Henderson, Amanda Lim, Jody McNabb, Michael Mikulak, Alexis Muirhead, Robbie Richardson, Rebecca Ross, and Delora Skelton. What amazing people.

At University of Toronto Press, Siobhan McMenemy has been, as usual, a wonderful editor to work with. I submitted the manuscript to UTP deliberately in hopes of having a chance to work with her again. Barbara Tessman copyedited the manuscript with care and insight, saving me from myself on many of these pages. A heartfelt thank you to those anonymous assessors who gave of their time and expertise to help me make this a better book.

Deepest appreciation goes to my family: my siblings Reg York, Peggy Frank, Marie Thody, and Pat Homenuck; my partner, Michael Ross, who supports, encourages, critiques, and cheers me on with irrepressible energy and wit; and my daughter, Anna Ross, who works so very hard at everything she does and yet is the most sociable person I know. You are my role model!

LITERARY CELEBRITY IN CANADA

Authors have, in one sense, never been more visible in Canada than they have in recent decades. Literary festivals and readings attract growing numbers of listeners, large book chains such as Chapters and Indigo sponsor author appearances, and community reading clubs have become so successful that publishers often gear texts for their use, offering club-friendly questions for further discussion at the end of chosen works. But in another sense, the author figure is peculiarly absent from our conception of Canadian literature. In academic circles, this is partly due to the refocusing of critical energies away from authorial intention in the wake of poststructuralist rethinkings of authorship and textuality. Authors are, popularly speaking, visible and active in the promotion of their wares in a major way, and yet critical writing on literature directs attention away from this figure, often fruitfully reframing the discussion in terms of ideology and power. This studied avoidance produces a curious disjunction between professional and more generally informed consumers of literary writing.