Worlds of Sound

Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar was a feminist at heart. Contrary to popular perception that he championed the cause of Dalits and dalit women, Babasaheb, as Ambedkar is fondly referred to, worked as a socio-political advocate for Dalit as well as upper caste Indian women concomitantly. In his quest to ensure freedom, equality, and individuality of Indian women, he resorted to the legalized mechanism and proposed sweeping constitutional provisions, famous as the Hindu code Bill, placing women at par with men in matters of inheritance and allowing them freedom to marry outside their caste. Contemplating the predicament and marginalized position of Indian women, he posited that caste and gender are intertwined. To maintain the system of caste, endogamy is a necessary condition that has an immense bearing on women. The imposition of endogamy was made compulsory by the Brahminical hierarchy, which was endorsed by Hindu religious scriptures to ensure women’s sustained subjectivity within the same caste groups or varnas. Ironically, the Bill, in Ambedkar’s own words was ‘killed and died unused and unsung’ following which he resigned from then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 but the same bill was passed as four different bills between 1955 and 1956 during Nehru’s second term as prime minister (Elancheran, 2018). Unfortunately, Ambedkar’s contribution to the Indian women’s struggle has not been given its due. This paper attempts to explode the myth of the golden age of Indian womanhood and critiques the role of women reformist organizations in nineteenth century India as well as Ambedkar’s yeoman service to Indian women that has largely remained unacknowledged in public discourse. Key Words: Ambedkar, Hindu Code Bill, Manusmriti, Indian Women, Dalit Women, Indian Feminism, Caste, Patriarchy

Reviewed by: Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Scott R. Irelan Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. Jonathan L. Chambers . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. xv + 268. $55.00 (cloth). Over the past five years the Southern Illinois University Press's "Theater in the Americas" series, edited by Robert A. Schanke, has produced an array of manuscripts that explore some of the most provocative and largely overlooked practitioners, organizations, and movements of the modern theater tradition in the United States. Titles have included works on Sophie Treadwell, the little theater movement, and Mordecai Gorelick; with this new study of John Howard Lawson, the SIU Press series continues not only to preserve, but also to enhance, its inimitable voice in the study of both modernity and theater within U.S. national culture. This recent addition to the SIU Press series deftly situates the marginalized, half-hidden work of communist playwright John Howard Lawson within a broader community of socially-aware, politically-engaged creative artists. It also offers an astute look at the trials and tribulations of the literary and artistic left in the years between the First World War and the Second World War. In doing so, Messiah of the New Technique encourages not only the "reconsideration of Lawson's career and the cultural and political left of the interwar years" but also the "larger cultural matrix of that historical moment" (3). The potency of this much needed study is enriched by Chambers's meticulous examination of Lawson's lived experiences, play scripts, letters, and theoretical writings regarding 1920s and 1930s theater as "material manifestations chronicling one man's journey to define who he was and where he belonged in the world as he ventured from 'artist-rebel' to 'political revolutionary'" (204). From the start it is apparent that Chambers is neither necessarily concerned with, nor particularly intrigued by, value judgments of Lawson's plays in production, choosing instead to concentrate his efforts on illustrating ways in which Lawson "was both a product and producer of the social energy specific to this era" (204). By way of introduction, Chambers takes great care to highlight the fact that a preponderance of existing scholarship has all but dismissed Lawson as a key "player in the evolution of United States drama" (4), with many publications offering nothing more than a "reductive view of Lawson's career in theatre" (5). This judgement, argues Chambers, warrants greater reflection given that during the interwar years Lawson penned Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Success Story (1932), Marching Song (1937), among several other plays, as well as the innovative [End Page 197] fusion of his Marxist aesthetics and writing style, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936). Chambers's egalatarian approach provides a thoughtful, cogent inquiry into all of Lawson's life in theater. Having carved out both niche and need, Chambers sets about the task of delineating his research frame, which is noticeably indebted to both neoMarxist criticism and the tenets of New Historicism. This deployment of materialist historiography provides a "long-overdue new reading of Lawson scripts for the theatre" as well as "a much needed study of the context that enveloped him" (13). Opening with Lawson's early life as the son of practicing Christian Scientists, continuing through his 1914 graduation from Williams College, and converging on the awakening of his aesthetic sensibilities and political beliefs, Chambers recounts the beginnings of Lawson's "intellectual and spiritual upheaval that would continue and intensify through the middle years of the 1930s" (21). This upheaval led Lawson both to make an early foray into commercial theater and then out of it shortly thereafter when he enlisted in the French ambulance corps where he became fast friends with John Dos Passos. For Chambers, the relationship with Dos Passos and wartime service in France provided the seed for both Lawson's commitment to revolutionary politics and his certainty that theater is a "pulpit from which he could communicate radical content" (22). Aesthetically and ideologically somewhere between Sheldon Cheney and Michael Gold, Lawson's scripts of the mid-1920s bore the mark...

We look back to explore the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on domestic violence amplification in India and the digital activisms that spotlighted this social and health injustice. This analysis focuses on two case studies – the #LockDownMeinLockUp [#LDMLU] campaign mobilized on Instagram, and articles drawn from the digital feminist publication, Feminism in India [FII]. We share our perspectives on how the #LDMLU campaign visually politicized the public nature of a silenced and normalized injustice against at-risk women during a pan-national health crisis. We turn to FII’s reporting on DV exacerbation during India’s pandemic that vocalized this issue from three critical perspectives: structural problems that contribute to gender injustices; financial violence; and mental, emotional, and physical health impacts on abused and at-risk women. In addition to this ‘look back,’ we look ahead to consider calls-to-action and opportunities, digital and/or on-ground, that remain imperative after the urgency of the viral lockdown. We are still at the threshold of activisms waiting, and needing, to happen. We conclude with questions for ourselves and our readers about what happens to advocacy when urgency ends. This growing body of feminist work demonstrates that advocacy will persist across physical and virtual landscapes. It is our responsibility and hope, as gender and communication scholars, to rally challenges against oppression based on gender or sex. Domestic violence against Indian women is continually overlooked. Our collective perspective intends to consolidate visibility toward such acts of abuse at the center of this scholarly piece.

The grand narratives of Mother India posit women’s emancipation as the central concern, insisting on her public participation in the educational and economic sectors. The relegation of the archetypal motherhood to the national periphery is strictly rooted in the Hindu traditional culture. The schisms of caste, class, and religion in contemporary society are normalised whilst the gendered undercurrents of domestic violence, chauvinism and religious sensibilities are ignored. Such polished idealisms are, in fact, far from the living reality of most women and girls across all spheres in the country. By reviewing notable texts from past and present, this research problematises the position of Muslim women in India, specifically during the nationalistic discourse and post-independent era. The national freedom struggle movement assured a democratic constitution, which primed Mother India as the figurative Indian woman encrypting ideologies from socio-religious discourses. The grand narratives often become instrumental in politicising the vested interest of the hegemonic class. The struggles of Muslim women were foregrounded not only in the gendered disparity of the religious domain but also in the socio-cultural disparities which excluded them from the domain of Indian womanhood. Mainstream history, literature and even women development organisations deliberately typified Muslim women along with the religious discourse. Briefly, in this paper, we infer that Muslim women were rendered invisible in the limelight of the archetypal Mother India, denying their social, political, cultural and literary participation. They were thus subjected to constitutional othering by the mainstream socio-political entities (who subjected them) at the onset of nationalism, which continues to exist in post-colonial discourses where women are expected to constantly negotiate their religious identity over their national identity.

Reviewed by: Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: the Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 by Lise Jaillant Hannah McGregor (bio) MODERNISM, MIDDLEBROW AND THE LITERARY CANON: THE MODERN LIBRARY SERIES, 1917-1955, by Lise Jaillant. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. xii + 211 pp. $99.00. Lise Jaillant’s Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon is an engagingly written and rigorously researched study of the Modern Library, focusing on the role of the quality reprint series in the circulation and popularization of modernist authors throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Jaillant offers convincing evidence, accrued through careful historical and archival research, that the interwar period in the United States was characterized by a blurring of the lines between modernism and the middlebrow, between prestigious classics and popular bestsellers, and between canonical authors and modern celebrities. In this way, Jaillant’s book constitutes a meaningful contribution to the field of middlebrow studies, particularly recent scholarship that has explored the middlebrow as an “amorphous … sphere” that could bring together the high and low in unexpected combinations that appealed to a wider range of cultural consumers.1 Jaillant’s book takes the form of six case studies bracketed by a brief introduction and conclusion, with each study teasing out the role of one more-or-less canonical author in the Modern Library series: H. G. Wells, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner. This approach allows her to be particularly precise in her discussion, aided throughout by graphs and maps that emphasize the studies’ fine attention to detail, of paratext, circulation, advertising, and reception. These case studies are brought together through what Jaillant calls “a forgotten moment in the history of modernism—the moment when ‘high’ modernist texts were sufficiently attractive to be reprinted in a cheap series, but had not yet been dissociated from ‘lesser’ works” (4). Tracing the shift from the early 1920s, when canonical modernists like Joyce and Woolf had become household names in the United States but were not yet widely accessible to common readers, to the post-World War II period, when suspicion of the masses and the emergence of professional literary criticism (especially New Criticism) led to rejection of the Modern Library’s democratizing drive, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon concludes that there was a moment when Joyce and Woolf could be read not only as modern classics but as “exciting and pleasurable” bestsellers (102). The case study of Woolf’s introduction to Mrs Dalloway is the most effective demonstration of how attention to context shifts our understanding of the relation between modernism and the middlebrow.2 Between 1928 and 1948, the Modern Library printed an edition of Mrs Dalloway accompanied by an introduction written by Woolf— [End Page 227] an introduction distinctly at odds with the perception of Woolf as a highbrow writer with well-documented disdain for the middlebrow.3 As Jaillant explains, the “Battle of the Brows” Woolf fought in England was a culturally specific debate shaped by the gender and class dynamics of the emerging literary profession in the United Kingdom (97). A similar debate certainly played out in the United States, but across different timelines;4 Jaillant argues that, in the 1920s, “American intellectuals did not share the same kind of anxieties over the ‘brows’” and “were content with the development of a vast middlebrow sphere, with less distinct ‘high’ and ‘low’” (97). The Modern Library’s focus on blurring distinctions between high and low modernist texts gave Woolf access to a wider and more diverse readership, which allowed her to explore her interest in amateur literary criticism. While Mrs Dalloway never stopped selling well for the Modern Library, the reception of modernism had shifted by the 1940s. The study of authors like Woolf became “institutionalized in English departments,” and modernism itself “came to be seen as a difficult movement for an elite” (102). It is only with the recent advent of the New Modernist Studies, Jaillant asserts, that the understanding of modernist literature as elite, aesthetically difficult, and reserved for professional readers has been challenged. Joyce was similarly popularized for an American audience via his inclusion in the Modern Library series. When A Portrait of the Artist as a...

abstractSo far as Dalit studies are concerned, the field has managed to appeal to a narrow readership, limited mostly to the context of India and the global South. Having allowed a confined space to Dalit studies, there is a common notion that this space is enough to translate all the nuances of the marginalised identity. The practice of casteism, of course, is not an isolated form of oppression and yet the recognition of the impact of other possible intersecting identities go unnoticed. Perhaps the predominant ideology behind popular discourses on feminism is the idea of a sisterhood shared by those who challenge a hyper-masculine patriarchy. It caters to a very limited notion of sisterhood that generalises the nuances that might be present in one’s identity. This essentially means that if one’s politics demands a more radical approach, it is either subsumed or excluded. Thus, mainstream feminism in India has been, for a long time, quick to exclude Dalit feminists from their politics. While it reeks of a privileged upper-class/caste or savarna culture, the logic has been this – to divide Dalit identity into sub-identities is a challenge to the notion of a unified, singular Dalit community. Thus, at any given moment, the political ideologies of a person are forced to be limited either to a genderless caste or a casteless gender. This article aims to question the productivity of such an exclusionary politics by looking into the nuanced language of Dalit women who were shaping an alternate modernity for themselves that has countered not only the nationalist project in India but also the casteless discourse of contemporary mainstream feminism. For this purpose, the article chooses to study Dalit women’s political poetry from Marathi, Telugu and Tamil languages (translated into English) to demonstrate how Dalit feminism formulates a body of thought that balances both the identities of being a Dalit and a woman.

The Polish Pocahontas Story: The Life of „the First Pole among the American Indians” According to Bolesław Zieliński In the inter-war years, so-called „Indian novels” enjoyed immense popularity with the younger Polish reading audience. The article analyzes a representative novel in this genre, Orli Szpon (Eagle Talon) by Bolesław Zieliński, as an example of a literary construction of Polishness based on a specifi c idea of racial difference. Its plot revolves around a love relationship between a Polish man and an Indian woman, therefore it brings to mind the story of Pocahontas as an important analogue. Reading Orli Szpon in the light of the colonialist implications of the story of Pocahontas shows the extent to which Zieliński’s novel relies on the schematic and biased imaginings about American Indians that dated back the colonial era and dominated American depictions of the Natives in the course of the nineteenth century.

Reviewed by: The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-Envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman Carmen García-Navarro THE FICTION OF DORIS LESSING: RE-ENVISIONING FEMINISM, by Ratna Raman. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021. 317 pp. $76.50 hardback. The general theoretical approach offered in The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman applies feminist thinking to Doris Lessing's narrative work. The volume's structure comprises an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, all richly annotated, including a bibliography and index. The book's narrative unity allows readers to enjoy its subtleties, which are made with precision and acuity, and to explore the most significant advances made in the field of Lessing research in India. Raman refers to her own status as a woman, academic, and connoisseur of Lessing's works, beginning with her excitement as a young reader who discovered threads of connection to Lessing's writings, as both women writers grappled with a British colonial past. Against this background, Raman places Lessing as a significant figure in India's literary and cultural life. Raman's feminist perspective highlights Lessing's importance as a key writer in and outside of the European context, not only in terms of the development of form but also because her texts reflect her concern for a world that was vanishing. As Raman notes in her insightful introduction, Lessing witnessed the tensions of colonial and postcolonial relations in the country of her youth, Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). These life circumstances gave Lessing the chance to observe and participate in the twentieth-century cultural landscape and, at the same time, exercise a critical distance from Eurocentric socio-political viewpoints—distance that became essential to her writing (p. 13). As Raman explains in the first chapter, entitled "Lessing and Feminism," the contributions of Lessing's position on feminism have been the subject of much critical debate, particularly since the publication of The Golden Notebook (1962). Lessing expressed a desire to break with an ancient structure that had been assimilated from many symbolic and material positions, a structure for which feminism was an obstacle (pp. 28-29). The first chapter also provides a brief history of Lessing's life in Zimbabwe, her family and love relations, her desire for education, and her need to write. With her move to London, Lessing carried the remnants of historical events such as World War I that had a lasting impact on her parents, the gradual fall of the British Empire and the colonial state, followed by the interwar period, the advent of World War II, and the emergence of a new world order. Thus, Raman's work springs from the need to revise and adjust old notions and reaffirm the place of writers like Lessing, who was a young woman asking for recognition from a specific postcolonial cultural and geographical space. [End Page 364] The second chapter of the book, entitled "The Interrogation of Liberal White Feminism," is devoted to Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing (1950) and examines the role of women in the context of African colonialism. According to Raman, this role needs to be reconsidered in light of the ambiguous stance of some white feminists who benefited from racial privilege despite having to be content with gendered limitations (p. 75). In this regard, the place of Asian, Indian, and Black women, who have been marginalized by a segment of feminism that has been slow to question the patriarchal, imperialist, and racist state's silence regarding them, is one of the concerns that white liberal feminism still needs to address (p. 89). The third chapter focuses on The Golden Notebook. Raman is drawn to Lessing's inquiries into the issues that women faced in mid-century politics, the knowledge they identified with, and the voices represented in the novel. She also emphasizes the importance of the foreword Lessing wrote for the 1971 edition, which focuses on how knowledge about women is created, shared, and received, as well as on the changes needed to ensure that women's authority is recognized. In Raman's view, Lessing drew on this authority when creating a "cultural matrix" composed of the five novels in The Children of Violence (1952...

The word ‘Feminism’, but understanding of it remains vague and there is a general rejection of its relevance to the Indian context. ‘Indian feminism’ should lie in the spread of education, economic self-sufficiency, preservation of human rights, self respect and in the awareness of the desire for liberation from all restriction made by patriarchal society. Sujata Parashar’s protagonist is a typical Indian woman, she has accepted everything without questioning. Sometimes she introspects and thinks of her marriage, she is trying to forgive herself and she feels if she forgives him, she may be able to forgive herself as well as with this realization, she goes back to her husband Gaurav.

Cinema is a powerful archive; an extension of the human perspective, where the nuanced human existence is dissected and laid bare for the spectators to find their realities. Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016) does that. The four women characters coming from lower-middle-class families of Bhopal, India, are shown to be trying to live their lives on their own terms; but the fetters of norms, gender regulations and patriarchy binds their wings. Foucault further claims that “a norm belongs to the arts of judgment and that although a norm is related to power, it is characterized less by the use of force or violence than by, as Ewald puts it, “an implicit logic that allows power to reflect upon its strategies and clearly define its objects. This logic is at once the force that enables us to imagine life and the living as objects of power, and the power that can take 'life' in hand, creating the sphere of the bio-political”. A melody as honest as this one requires a leitmotif - Passion. As the movie unfolds on screen that makes the viewer recall a vague sense of doomsday, the lyrics in the background confess, “Passion, you ruined my life without ever asking me first.” Deep in the confines of a beauty parlour, one woman tells another, “You know what our problem is? We dream too much.” The film closes with four women marvelling at erotica, where the oldest tells the youngest to have the courage to dream, even as her demeanour sits heavy, recovering from shame. Female Passion (sexual, emotional, career-driven etc.) in a patriarchal, small-town circumstance gives each woman the courage to come alive - and yet, each time they do, Reality shakes the dreams out of their eyes, making them die a little more inside. As with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the confines of a woman’s identity allow her acceptance in society, where she navigates her secret desires in utter isolation (i.e. turning into a symbolic Mr. Hyde) now and then, but always returning to her “respectable face” (i.e. the symbolic Dr Jekyll) until it becomes impossible to separate the two, leading to her downfall. This ambivalence in female identity then seems deeply rooted in a culture of shame, where more “feminist” desires may only be pursued by being “shameless” - she steps forwards in the community to enact the performance of a lifetime (her oppression is, literally, a life-sentence) as she slips from one persona (an actor’s mask) to the next, finding and losing herself in the stolen moments between them. The film then appears as a commentary on sustenance - the Female, in less-privileged societies, helpless in their despair, may only come alive in split persona. Their stories are all the same. Their lipstick (self-expression, autonomy) is hidden away under their (both symbolic and literal) burkas.

This article focuses on “second-wave” feminist perspectives on the role of the state and its effectiveness in removing gender-based inequality in Indian society. The major argument is that feminist rethinking of the relationship of women to the state illustrates the maturity of the Indian women's movement and its recognition that well-planned, mobilized, and effective state policies are crucial to the promotion of women's interests. Recent scholarship has addressed, more systematically and more critically than any in the past, the nexus between social and political processes and the subordination of women. It provides a contextualized and nuanced understanding of the complex interconnections between gender, state, religion, and community. Consequently, not only have feminist writings of the past two decades in India added to current gender sensitive scholarship on the state and development, they have also facilitated the construction of programmatic guides for realizing “strategic gender interests.”

The paper makes an effort to trace the status of women from the prehistoric period to the contemporary period to explore how the status of women changed in Indian society over the ages and patriarchy evolved to assume a complex structure. Indian women experienced a severe form of subordination as religious tradition and caste hierarchy shaped social practices. It not only unearths the history but also makes textual analysis of the prominent feminist texts and theories to show how women writers penned down their experiences and resisted the ideology and structure of patriarchal society. The period of the colonial period has been dealt with extra emphasis as in that phase history witnessed the rise of women’s movement and nationalism, and these two movements somehow expressed contradictory core values. In order to comprehend the struggle of women to liberate themselves from the bondage of patriarchy, the pieces of literary works written by female writers are indispensable. It is often blamed that in the Indian feminist movement there is a theoretical paucity. The attempt has been initiated to present the principal ideas of Indian feminist scholars and connect the missing links.

This chapter will address the long-standing conflicting relationship between Indian feminists and the legal system. Rape continues to be a serious issue for Indian women. In India as in other parts of the world, the question of rape is linked to women's ‘status’ within society. As the author has argued elsewhere, it is difficult to measure the ‘status of women’, especially in the context of a large and diverse country such as India.

In nationalist discourse Indian women were invested with the role of representing the essence of Indian culture and the core of the authentically Indian nation. In this chapter, I will explore how the female characters in Midnight’s Children reflect this elevated status and how far they conform to the nationalist ideal of the Indian woman. I will compare Rushdie’s strategies of depicting women and their compliance with or resistance to patriarchal structures to the approaches of Indian feminist historiography. Feminist historiography holds a critical distance in relation to both imperialist and nationalist historiography and this is also Rushdie’s approach. As the previous chapter demonstrates, Midnight’s Children is conceived within the parameters of the nationalist version of Indian history but also criticises its shortcomings, specifically the exclusion of subaltern groups. Here I will examine the novel’s representation of how the nation accommodates its women. Feminist historiography delineates how the nationalist construct of the Indian woman took shape and how it has influenced real women. I will use its findings to interpret the novel’s portrayal of female character, which often appears contradictory and ambiguous.

Introduction: Modernism and the Networks of Celebrity Construction Guy Davidson, Special cluster coordinator (bio) The essays collected in this section make key contributions to the rapidly expanding field of literary celebrity studies. Focusing on the moment of high early twentieth century modernity (1920s–1930s), the essays attend less to the embodied author’s often tortuous relation to the category of celebrity — the primary interest of pioneering works in the field, such as Loren Glass’s Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States (2004) and Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005) — and more to a concern with the construction of celebrity by closely networked markets, taste communities, forms of publicity, and media (radio, sound recordings, film, theatre, journalism, and literature). While not dismissing authorial agency, these essays, through their meticulous contextualizations of various interwar literary careers, sharpen our appreciation of how literary fame was shaped by the large-scale, interlocking forces of capitalist modernity. The competitive dynamic of twentieth-century literary celebrity is the organizing concern of Faye Hammill’s “Noël Coward and the Sitwells: Enmity, Celebrity, Popularity.” The Sitwells and Coward, who engaged in a famous, decades-long feud, were placed and placed themselves amid opposing binaries modernist/popular; aristocratic/middle-class; eccentric/mainstream; difficult/accessible. While critics have generally accepted this set of distinctions, Hammill demonstrates the actual closeness of these writers. The common conception of both the Sitwells and Coward as brittle wits indicates the shared approaches and shared appeal of these nominally opposed representatives of avant-garde art and crowd-pleasing entertainment. Through deft and detailed comparisons of the creative works of Coward and the Sitwells, their self-fashioning efforts in [End Page 127] autobiographies and correspondence, and their critical reception and publicity in magazines and newspaper columns, Hammill revises received understandings of these writers and makes an important contribution to the exploration of the intertwinement of avant-garde art and popular culture that has become a key strand within modernism studies. The often surprising intimacies of modernism and entertainment are also a central feature of Lise Jaillant’s “ ‘Shucks, we’ve got glamour girls too!’: Gertrude Stein, Bennett Cerf and the Culture of Celebrity.” Building on Karen Leick’s discussion of the importance of Cerf, co-owner of the Modern Library and Random House, to Stein’s celebrity status, and drawing on a range of little-known archives, Jaillant demonstrates how Cerf ’s fascination with celebrity and his extensive network of contacts in the film industryenabled him to fashion Stein, during her 1934–35 publicity tour of the US, as a literary star equivalent to Hollywood stardom. This process is intriguingly epitomized in the media coverage of Stein’s relations with movie star Miriam Hopkins, which were stage-managed by Cerf. The 1934–35 tour built on Cerf ’s successful full-scale media marketing of a reprint of Stein’s Three Lives and her libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts, experimental works that were advertised as appealing to audiences seeking sheer entertainment. Outlining hitherto little-discussed aspects of Stein’s celebrity career, Jaillant increases our appreciation of the way in which the rigors of modernist writing were frequently aligned with commodified leisure. In “The Conditions of Fame: Literary Celebrity in Australia between the Wars,” David Carter further demonstrates the confluences of “high” art and overtly commodified entertainment in this period. Through a forensic account of the approach and content of a number of mass market and commercially successful Australian magazines of the interwar period, Carter shows how modern celebrity and literary value, treated equally in those magazines, challenge current anachronistic characterizations of highbrow and lowbrow audiences and their interests. But while Carter demonstrates how these magazines indicate Australia’s participation in the promotion of international literary celebrities, the magazines were ultimately unable to establish homegrown celebrities who could compete with foreign ones. Carter argues that it was only after the war when new binary oppositions were established between culture and entertainment that Australian writing became a newly self-sufficient interest for readers. Carter thus offers an important local qualification of the increasingly familiar history of modern literary celebrity, even as his essay indicates the transnational dimension of early...