Marie Corelli : New Perspectives on Cultural Currency in Popular Fiction and the Literary Marketplace

Reframes Marie Corelli as an active producer of cultural value, reappraising her bestselling fictions via varied contexts and methodologies.

Marie Corelli knew what it took to stay current through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She played on her relevancy to ‘her public’ in the face of criticism within the review pages. She engineered her own cultural significance by contriving connections to other writers, through intertextual references and conspicuous interventions concerned with the preservation of literary heritage and, in her late career, endeavoured to stay up to date by moving with shifting ideas of scientific discovery and gender, and by changing her publishing strategy. This book explores how Corelli’s contemporaneous fame and bestselling popular fiction were predicated upon a canny ability to capitalise upon emerging discourses, societal concerns and literary trends. Its chapters apply new critical approaches to bring cohesive understanding to Corelli as a literary phenomenon, persuade as to her significance in the wider field of Victorian studies and offer a transhistorical perspective on cultural currency and the popular voice.