Idolizing Authorship. Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present

What is it about?

The Danish author Holger Drachmann (1846-1908) made his official debut as a writer in 1872 and until his death his contemporaries regarded him, as did he himself, as the national Danish poet par excellence. But his fame turned out to be fleeting, and in the decades succeeding his death, his popularity declined and most of his oeuvre fell prey to oblivion. Nevertheless, even today Drachmann’s name still has a familiar ring to almost every Dane. One of the reasons why Drachmann still appeals to the imagination of many contemporary Danes is his conscious and successful construction of a range of memorable literary personae. Drachmann constantly oscillated between various – often conflicting – literary roles and personae, e.g. between the romantic ‘bard’, the modern bohemian artist, the representative of ‘the ordinary man’, etc. This shows his feverish attempts to find new ways to be and artist in an era of radical societal change and turmoil. Despite his enormous productivity, Drachmann constantly was in need for money, and his many personae can also be perceived as experiments to find new means of subsistence. Furthermore, his name and portrait were often used in advertisements (for cigars, hotels, bicycles etc.), but also in less profitable contexts such as in charity fundraising campaigns for the benefit of others. In this chapter I would look into Drachmann’s conscious construction of various public images, underpinning his status as literary celebrity. What were the ingredients and strategies he deployed? How did they develop during his career, and why was his branding so immensely effective during his lifetime, and even after more then a century since his death still vivid and widely known, while at the same time most of his oeuvre is forgotten. In other words: what happened in the transition of Danish media culture between the 1870’s and the early 1900’s - from late-romanticism to early-modernity?

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