How did the stately, republican literary world of Washington Irving
and James Fenimore Cooper give way to the sensationalist,
personality-saturated mass market society of the late nineteenth
century? In answering this question, Sentiment and Celebrity tells
the story of a man the New YorkTimes once called "the most
talked-about author in America." A widely admired, if
controversial, master of the sentimental appeal, poet and
"magazinist" Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) was a pioneer in
the modern business of celebrity. In his heyday, he knew both
popularity and success as few other American writers had. Willis,
who became the gossip-dishing darling of the middle class and whose
sister was the popular writer Fanny Fern (of Ruth Hall fame), was a
shrewdly self-styled man of letters who attained international fame
by publicizing the renowned figures of the day, including himself,
and by playing to, or playing upon, the sentimental desires of his
readers. By the 1840s, he could count himself among the nation's
highest paid writers and most influential arbiters of fashion and
feeling (especially with genteel women), though he could also
describe himself, accurately enough, as one of the "best abused"
literary men of his generation. With fame and self-promotion came
unexpected, perhaps unforeseeable, burdens, and scandal followed
eventually.
By charting the various controversies that surrounded Willis, this
book shows how the cultural and commercial impulses that fostered
antebellum America's new love of fame and fashion drew sustenance
from the concurrent allure of genteel cultivation and sentiment.
Still, perennial tensions between desires for privacy and the
invasive impulses of publicity, and between desires for sincerity
and the appeal of social and commercial artifice, rendered this
cultural conjunction highly unstable. Readers of Willis were both
attracted to and disturbed by his written work and his very person;
he introduced new possibilities for fashion, taste, and celebrity,
and these new modes of thought and emotion were at once enchanting
and unsettling. Because this cultural instability and the impulses
that spawned it cut across a number of discourses, and because, in
many ways, this double-edged quality remains central to our modern
celebrity culture, Sentiment and Celebrity will appeal to students
and scholars of several disciplines, among them literary studies,
women's studies, sociocultural history, and communication studies.
As Thomas N. Baker demonstrates in these fascinating pages, not
only does Willis's story enrich our understanding of the early
history of celebrity and the development of this country's literary
marketplace in the years before the Civil War, it also shows how
the cultural phenomena of sentiment and celebrity have gone hand in
hand since their inception. Given the countless ways in which fame
(literary or otherwise) continues to pervade (and pervert) the
American Dream, Baker's book is a "life and times" study that
speaks directly to our own lives.
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