The Author as Activist – Literature, Politics, and Celebrity

Funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF as part of its Elise Richter excellence initiative, the project studies the historical intersections of literature, politics, the media, and celebrity culture. Through selected case studies from the British context, covering a time period from the nineteenth century to the present, it zooms in on the ways in which the cultural authority of the writer has served as a tool of socio-political activism. It aims at enriching the established cultural histories of literary authorship, political activism, and celebrity by bringing them together through the perspective of life writing, arguing that writerly authority gets staged and sustained via autobiographical genres and formats.

The project is embedded within a wide network of national and international collaborators, including the University of Vienna’s Department of English and American Studies and Netzwerk Biographieforschung (Biography Research Network); the Writing 1900 research network; the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.