Call for Abstracts Special Issue Fall 2025

Iperstoria Special Issue no. 26 - Call for Papers: Parties, Luxury and American Celebrity: From Gatsby to Instagram

Guest editors: Alessandro Clericuzio, University of Perugia (alessandro.clericuzio@unipg.it); Cinzia Schiavini, University of Milan (cinzia.schiavini@unimi.it)

 

2025 marks the centennial of The Great Gatsby, a novel that exposed readers worldwide to American luxury and celebrity culture. With its taste for lavish parties, exclusive purlieus, and sumptuous mansions, Francis Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece embodies a distinctly American preoccupation with wealth, social status, and fame that has shaped the nation's literary and cultural landscape. "I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people," declares Jay Gatsby about his mansion, epitomizing this enduring American fascination not just with celebrity and social spectacle, but also with the dark underside of the national cult of success.

This fascination emerges throughout American literary history: from Edith Wharton's New York balls to Henry James's transatlantic exchanges, from Dorothy Parker's witty flapper stories to Theodore Dreiser's tragedies and Truman Capote's satires. Such works portray a complex ecosystem of socialites, moguls, immoderate millionaires, undercover frauds, and social climbers, revealing gendered and racialized class dynamics that continue to resonate. Contemporary authors like E. L. Doctorow, James Ellroy, and Nghi Vo have further explored these themes, adapting them to new contexts while maintaining focus on fame's appeal and dangers. In asking whether and how these representations have somehow entailed a proclivity for luxury in terms of cultural history, readership, and circulation of literary works, it is also crucial to consider which works are omitted from this canon and the reasons of their exclusion.

The American obsession with celebrity predates the twentieth century, tracing back to the antebellum period. Entertainment figures like Jenny Lind and Charlotte Cushman (who was revered for her impersonation of male roles) achieved unprecedented fame, while the search for ambition and success on the part of the Booth family went astray, eventually leading to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Later on, the emergence of the Hollywood star-system has ceaselessly contributed fodder to a national and global repository of idolized celebrities, and the same happened with popular music icons (from Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson, from Madonna to Taylor Swift) or, more recently, with the digital age of social media influencers and Booktok personalities, who show the power to infiltrate and possibly condition the political arena. Each epoch has contributed new dimensions to American celebrity culture while maintaining certain recurring patterns of social visibility and status-seeking. Often, the status of quasi-mythological figures, such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, is not so much actively sought by the stars themselves as is the outcome of a monumentalization process on the part of critics and the public alike.

And yet, parties and gatherings do not always signify mere light-hearted fun. As evidenced by the restrictions put in place during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, they can acquire a gloomy and ominous mood best evoked in “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe's gothic carnival. Likewise, the AIDS epidemic that has plagued the world since the 1980s has had a large impact on the queer community and some of its most prominent celebrities, with Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Charles Ludlam – whose obituary on the New York Times front page was the first to acknowledge AIDS as the cause of death – being only one of the many who succumbed to the disease.

The 21st century's widespread celebrity culture has given rise to Celebrity Studies as a distinct branch of humanities scholarship, particularly within American Studies, as testified by the launch of the eponymous journal in 2010. The aim of this special issue is to examine how American artists have depicted, critiqued, and generated celebrity across various media and historical periods, with particular attention to questions of access, exclusion, and resistance.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

 

1. American Literary Celebrity and Canon Formation

- The evolution of literary fame from the early 19th century to present

- The role of celebrity in shaping literary movements (the Expatriates, the Beats, the New Lost Generation)

- Contemporary literary responses to fame and social media

 

2. Cultural Dynamics and Exclusion

- African American and immigrant experiences of luxury and celebrity

- The Harlem Renaissance's engagement with or resistance to dominant celebrity patterns

- Intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in celebrity culture

 

3. Critical Approaches

- Celebrity's relationship to ecocriticism, trauma studies, queer theory, and disability studies

- Transnational dimensions of American celebrity

- Digital media's impact on literary fame and book dissemination

 

4. The Great Gatsby at 100

- Fresh readings of the novel and its filmed adaptations

- Comparative analyses with other works by Fitzgerald and contemporary authors

- The role of parties and luxury as organizing principles in American literary periodization

 

We particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider, within the American context:

- The relationship between literary and popular celebrity

- Digital transformations of fame and social visibility

- Celebrity's role in challenging or reinforcing social barriers

- The evolution of luxury and excess as literary themes

- Comparative analyses of American and international celebrity cultures

 

Timeline:

Those interested in submitting a proposal should send a 250-word abstract to the editors at alessandro.clericuzio@unipg.it) and cinzia.schiavini@unimi.it by January 15, 2025. Abstracts will be evaluated by the editors and notifications will be sent shortly thereafter.

Publication is scheduled for December 2025. Selected papers, in either Italian or English, must be submitted by April 30, 2025 and should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words in length.

Submitted manuscripts must be original and uploaded to the journal's website following the procedure available at the link: https://iperstoria.it/about/submissions.

Final acceptance will depend on the relevance of the article to the call theme(s), as well as on the originality and quality level of the submission. All submitted manuscripts must conform to Iperstoria’s guidelines.