Romantic genius and literary celebrity in American literature

In spite of postmodern attempts by prominent figures such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to deconstruct the Author, and to expose as fraudulent and false some of the underlying assumptions related to genius, a popular understanding of the Author-as-Genius persists in the American imagination and marketplace. Intricately tied to the figure of Romantic genius, (now over 200 years old), the ideal articulation of the Author-as-Genius is that of the Byronic hero: an ostensibly heterosexual white male whose patterns of behavior fluctuate between a complicated brooding and a heroic audaciousness. Perhaps the clearest portrait of this figure in American Literature is found in Ralph Waldo Emerson's mid-nineteenth century essay, "The Poet." Composed in a historical moment when the rapidly expanding publishing culture of the United States was defining the notion of mass-mediation, Emerson's figure was codified into a lasting signifier of literary genius. Having undergone a series of revisions from the mid-nineteenth century to the contemporary moment, the Author-as-Genius continues to have profound implications for American Letters and the American Imaginary. Such implications are what this dissertation explores.; My argument is that since at least the mid-nineteenth century, American authors and institutions promoting and disseminating authorship have had to negotiate an author's authentic "self" with this figuration of "Author-as-Genius." Moreover, I argue, an author's literary celebrity is often determined by their success in perpetuating their own status as a genius. By examining a variety of American literary figures and cultural icons---Sadakichi Hartmann, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan---as well as the genre of Arab-American poetry---I explore the relationship between the trope of Romantic genius and literary celebrity in the United States. In my discussion of these figures, I consider the impact of identity politics on an artist's ability to fashion him/herself within the tradition of Romantic genius. Finally, as my chapter on Arab-American poetry demonstrates, I show how the trope of genius is tied to political and emancipatory ends for minority American subjects.