Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in
nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts,
periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the
transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to
gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and
specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the
successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as
Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret
Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley
helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that
used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about
femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates,
involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications
for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and
extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's
biography of Charlotte BrontA" served simultaneously to support
claims for BrontA"'s genius and to diminish BrontA"'s body in
compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a
touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and
celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on
behalf of Charlotte BrontA" to portray the weak woman's body
becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within
the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the
complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex,
the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively
resisted an intense backlash against their own success.
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