Search results for ""Author Faye Hammill""

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon—celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers—Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield—who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today. Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers—as well as their gender—affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination. The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

Read more less

An important critical study of Canadian literature, placing internationally successful anglophone Canadian authors in the context of their national literary history. While the focus of the book is on twentieth-century and contemporary writing, it also charts the historical development of Canadian literature and discusses important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. The chapters focus on four central topics in Canadian culture: Ethnicity, Race, Colonisation; Wildernesses, Cities, Regions; Desire; and Histories and Stories. Each chapter combines case studies of five key texts with a broad discussion of concepts and approaches, including postcolonial and postmodern reading strategies and theories of space, place and desire. Authors chosen for close analysis include Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, Thomas King and Carol Shields. Key Features * The first critical guide to Canadian literature in English * Authors selected on the basis of their popularity on undergraduate courses * Combines historical and thematic approaches to Canadian writing * Links close reading of key texts with theoretical approaches to Canadian literature * Discusses in detail Obasan by Joy Kogawa, Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, The Republic of Love by Carol Shields, 'Wilderness Tips' and The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood, Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, The Diviners by Margaret Laurence and In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

Read more less