Vol. 20 No. 1 (2026): Celebrity

This issue of the journal Relief explores literary celebrity in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon that is at once mediatic, social, and aesthetic. Building on the anglophone celebrity studies tradition and recent francophone scholarship, it shifts their perspectives by proposing to consider celebrity not only as a reception phenomenon, but also as a driving force behind writers' trajectories and literary forms themselves. Distinct from glory — posthumous and admiring — and from reputation — tied to a function —, celebrity rests on the contemporaneity between a person and a public, on curiosity rather than admiration, and on an asymmetry of visibility. An essentially mediatic phenomenon, it takes root in the mid-eighteenth century before fully asserting itself in the nineteenth century with the rise of the press. The issue develops the idea of a celebrity imperative: as the media landscape takes shape, writers find themselves subject to a dual condition, that of creators and that of public relations agents. Celebrity becomes a system with its own codes, constraints, and strategies, from which no one can escape without risking literary failure. Far from being reducible to normative constraints, however, this imperative can prove generative, stimulating innovation and giving rise to new modes of expression. Celebrity thus emerges as a structuring operator of the literary field, one that reconfigures forms of writing, authorial postures, and modes of legitimation.