SSR Practice/David Carter/The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars

By Stacey Koch

Complete citation:

Carter, David. “The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 39, no. 1, 2015, pp. 170-187. JSTOR, doi:10.2979/jmodelite.39.1.170.

If web access: url; date accessed: 25/08/2020

Key Words: Modernity; Australia; Author; Authorship; Celebrity; Magazine; Literary; Transnational.

Brief Overview: Investigates the transnational reasons why Australian authors had difficulty attaining the celebrity status of other creative artists during the 1920s and 1930s.

Summary of key points:

• Cinema, theatre, Art, and Literature was often featured in the same journals.
• Other, more glamorous, forms of ‘Art’ often stole the spotlight from Literature. Literature was considered linked to journalism.
• British and US literature often drew more attention as well
• Australia failed to establish a strong commercial book culture tailoring to all levels of society

Important Quotations:

“But “serious” contemporary literary fame inevitably meant the big names or the latest names from the British book world: H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Conan Doyle; or middlebrow bestsellers such as Jeffrey Farnol, May Sinclair, and Michael Arlen, all of whom appeared with photographs and/or “personality” articles in the Aus-tralian magazines under discussion. At a time when the Australian book world was virtually contemporaneous with the London book world, such authors had a kind of newsworthiness and contemporaneity, a cultural and social standing that was difficult for any Australian author to achieve.” (174)

“Art was more than good taste or fashion, for it could participate in genius; but we might say that for Home taste and fashion were themselves more than mere taste and fashion, for they were vehicles of social transformation, central in the creation of a modern society. Still, “society,” in the narrow sense of the term, remains the mediator. The magazine enacts a textbook case of “intraconversion” between social and cultural capital (English 10–11). Artistic or literary standing could be converted into social capital, while social standing added glamor and personality to artistic achievement. This helps explain why artists appear more often than writers in the magazines. The figure of the artist was better established and more autonomous than that of the author, which was still entangled with journalism.” (182-183)

“Perhaps what most constrained mid-century Australia was not its failure to create a national culture, but its inability to sustain robust commercial institutions where good and ordinary, intellectual and entertaining, high, middle. and lowbrow Australian books might thrive — and Australian authors, too, even as celebrities.” (184)

Significance in relation to potential project:

This paper could assist the group in the study of consumerism in Australia by offering insight into the 1920s-1930s public magazine consumption in relation to popular depictions of creativity. This paper also relates facts about 1920s-1930s celebrity culture in the circulation of magazines and journals.