This dissertation investigates how and why contemporary canonical authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie incorporate their celebrity and canonical status as authors into the fictional worlds of their novels. The contemporary celebrity author in general is at the mercy of a more globalized publication industry that depends on a circuit of international circulation, translation, and the diverse reactions of a transnational readership. More specifically, each of the authors I focus on in this dissertation have become notorious, both for their professional literary achievements as well as various political or sexual scandals running alongside their publication history. The decentralization of the author’s power to control his own image as it becomes stratified across a multiplicity of competing discourses, audiences, and marketplaces is spurred on by a literary marketplace that favors world literature, international circulation, and the whims of readership response. Thus, the need to revise or challenge the public perception of their authorship is constantly at stake for these figures – so much so that they introduce doppelgänger versions of themselves into their fiction to negotiate this relationship. I argue that the hybrid-generic form of autobiographical-metafiction allows these authors to integrate this struggle for authority over their own authorship into both the form and content of their fictional worlds. Ultimately, the project of tracing different iterations of the doppelgänger novelist across national and historical markers helps us formulate a contemporary theory of authorship that asserts how the “author” must always operate in a liminal space between the constructed fictional world and the real historical world. / English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/2109 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Partyja, Jaclyn |
| Contributors | Lee, Sue-Im, 1969-, Gauch, Suzanne, 1965-, English, James F., 1958-, Darling-Wolf, Fabienne |
| Publisher | Temple University. Libraries |
| Source Sets | Temple University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 197 pages |
| Rights | IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/2091, Theses and Dissertations |
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