Author Description

"Marketing the Author looks at the careers and writings of a selection of writers - from celebrated Modernists and Victorians such as James Joyce, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, to relatively obscure authors such as Emilia Dillke, 'Lucas Malet' and W. T. Stead - writing at the turn of the twentieth century." "What is it that ties together such a heterogeneous group of writers? They all took advantage of the exciting contemporary developments in the literary market-place in order to design a writerly self which, they believed, would possibly immortalise their name and their work and certainly promote the sale of their books - with varying degrees of success. The essays featured in this volume analyse the methods adopted by authors to self-mythologise and their reasons for doing so. They also try to answer the question first formulated by Michel Foucault when he wondered 'at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes'."--BOOK JACKET.