The Rise of Celebrity Authorship is about ways of reading as much as it is about celebrity authorship, nineteenth-century print culture, and antislavery. Sarah Allison positions the book at the intersection of computational studies and the sociology of literature. The former approach radically decontextualizes literary works, reading them as conglomerations of quantifiable words and conventions, while the latter deeply embeds texts in the cultural field of their production and reception. In combining the two, Allison asks us to renounce the belief that authors wrote their own celebrity into existence, and to see celebrity instead as something produced by a hodge podge of texts, many of which were written by people whose names have all but disappeared from literary history. When we stop privileging authors as the engineers of their own celebrity, Allison promises, some of the categories through which we study them, such as the national literary tradition to which they belong and the major genres in which they worked, also fade in importance.

Allison reads celebrity authorship as the production of an "ensemble cast" of print forms that are often overlooked by literary critics who have been trained to focus on the star player (1). Much as a TikTok influencer's sway seems to depend on individual charisma but may in fact involve make-up artists, sponsors, and a video production team, so in the nineteenth century literary celebrity depended on "a host of print forms that share[d] an association with the author's person and work" (3). These miscellaneous print forms included gift books, autographs, biographies and autobiographies, travel writing, and the homes and haunts genre that described places closely associated with an author and their works. By recovering the work performed by "relatively minor figures writing in what now seem like marginal genres but in the context of the major political and intellectual currents of their time" (5), the book restores a sense of proportion to our understanding of the nineteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace.

The book's first chapter frames the ones that follow by introducing some of the methods and modes of reading Allison employs. Bibliometric analysis reveals "the centrality of nonfictional genres" such as travel writing, gift books, and life writing in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace, while the practice of reading "sideways" across genres, borrowed from periodical studies, offers a nondigital way to "reckon with the glorious miscellaneousness" of nineteenth-century print (37). Algorithmic criticism, a methodology that may be unfamiliar to some readers, stands both to transform our understanding of genre and to redraw the parameters of the archives we work. Allison explains algorithmic criticism by taking as a brief case study Josiah Henson, who attained some celebrity as the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom. In a large-scale study that trained an algorithm to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction texts, including nonfiction life-writing that might share formal and linguistic features with novels, Henson's Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849) emerged as a "difficult case"--a text that the algorithm couldn't decisively categorize as either fiction or nonfiction. The algorithm confirmed what we already know: that "the form of the slave narrative looks like a novel...in part because it is related in first person and includes dialogue" (29). After the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which, as Stowe's later Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) made clear, drew on Henson's Life, Henson revised his narrative to make explicit the connections between Stowe's novel and his life. Henson makes a useful case study for Allison because his celebrity so clearly depended upon "the interplay between the fictional and factual accounts of his life" (30). She uses Henson's Life to argue for a redistribution of our literary critical attention away from the novel--the form that dominates studies of nineteenth-century literature, despite our knowledge that it occupied "a relatively small portion of the 'literary' landscape'"(22)-- and onto the nonfictional forms that existed alongside it.

Subsequent chapters focus on some of the forms of print that created a sense of readerly intimacy with authors and mobilized their celebrity as a form of cultural capital in the transatlantic antislavery movement: gift books, homes and haunts, travel writing, autographs, and life writing. These chapters foreground authors who might not ordinarily figure largely in studies of celebrity authorship or of antislavery, such as George Putnam and the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer, as well as more familiar candidates, including Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet Martineau. In these chapters, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship makes visible the emergence of celebrity studies as a thriving subfield within the broader field of nineteenth-century literature and culture. It builds on predecessors, including Alexis Easley's Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authors, 1850-1914 (2011), Alison Booth's Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries (2016), Paul Westover and Ann Wierda Rowland's Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century (2016), and Sharon Marcus's The Drama of Celebrity (2019) by examining how a broad range of print forms and a dispersed mode of authority participated in creating literary celebrity.

The Rise of Celebrity Authorship shows that antislavery writing played an important part in manufacturing literary celebrity, and that it mobilized celebrity, sometimes in unauthorized and contradictory ways, to further its cause. Whether antislavery played a larger or different role in creating celebratory authorship than other discourses or fields of cultural production remains a question. Arguably, there was no other issue in the nineteenth century Anglophone world that permeated print culture to the extent that antislavery did, but that fact does not answer the question of whether antislavery's contribution to celebrity authorship was representative or a special case. More importantly, although The Rise of Celebrity Authorship discusses the work of Black and white writers, it does not explore how racialized forms of power within the context of antislavery might have impacted the production of celebrity authorship. The history of white appropriation of Black writers' stories (Harriet Beecher Stowe and Josiah Henson), white editing and rewriting of Black authors' texts (Thomas Pringle and Mary Prince; Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Jacobs) and white exploitation of Black celebrity (William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass), surely requires an acknowledgement that the production of celebrity authorship by an "ensemble cast" of miscellaneous print forms and little-known authors might not work the same way for Black authors as for white. Indeed, all of the gift books, homes and haunts, and autograph collections that feature in The Rise of Celebrity Authorship were produced by white authors, albeit on behalf of the antislavery cause. Eric Gardener's, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015), Benjamin Fagan's The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (2016), and Kim Gallon's Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (2020), among other works, have explored the flourishing of Black newspapers and periodicals in the nineteenth-century United States, but if these forms of Black print featured in the archive on which The Rise of Celebrity Authorship is based, they are not visible in its conclusions. Whether we are employing algorithmic criticism, sideways reading, or close reading, the data we use will determine the questions we can ask and the conclusions we may draw.

The book's final chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), highlights the ambiguity of antislavery's place in The Rise of Celebrity Authorship. Allison acknowledges that Gaskell's Life has only the most tangential of relationships to "explicit antislavery discourse" (127) and is not interested in trying to convince us otherwise. Instead, she reads Brontë as a counterpart to Josiah Henson--that is, as someone whose celebrity was produced through the complicated interaction of fiction and nonfiction. Gaskell's Life attempts to redress nineteenth-century readers' tendencies to read Brontë's work in autobiographical terms, and to excoriate it as at once too truthful and not truthful enough. The chapter returns us to the fascinating ontological and epistemological questions raised earlier in the book: How do readers tell fiction from fact? How might an algorithm distinguish between them? How do fiction and nonfiction interact to produce celebrity authorship?

These questions give the chapters on Henson and Brontë a philosophical heft. They are also a reminder that Allison comes to antislavery by way of computational studies and algorithmic criticism, methods that informed her first book, Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing (2018), rather than a background in critical race studies or Black literature and culture. I wonder how these approaches might help us consider how power has shaped the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, and how racism and misogyny have blurred it. Readers interested in the role that racial difference played in the emergence of celebrity authorship may not find answers to their questions in this book, but they might instead find themselves inspired to use its innovative methodologies to find the answers themselves.

Juliet Shields is Professor of English and Kahn Chair in the Humanities at Southern Methodist University.