Literary Careers in the Modern Era

Literary Careers in the Modern Era is the first study of the shape and diversity of the literary career in the 20th and 21st centuries. It engages questions such as: what counts as a successful career for a literary author and how do norms of success change over time? And given the explosion of self-publishing in the digital era, who now counts as an 'author'? Although literary criticism often focuses on an individual author's career, what is meant by this term is rarely examined. This collection of essays, which brings together scholarship on a wide range of authors from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, seeks to address this gap. It investigates how literary careers are made and unmade, and the relationship between the career, the personal life of an author and public celebrity. The essays demonstrate that the modern literary career is complex phenomenon, subject to multiple social and psychological pressures.

Guy Davidson is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Nicola Evans Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and Assistant Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work on film and literature has appeared in many journals including Screen, Discourse, Culture Theory and Critique, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Life Writing and Continuum.