In her 1925 collection of essays on craft, The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton reflected on the basis of her literary technique and her belief in the formal weaknesses of an emergent literary modernism. Coming towards the end of what scholars frequently recognise as her greatest period of production in fiction, beginning with The House of Mirth (1905) and topped off by The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton used her literary fame and the platform it gave her in The Writing of Fiction to question what she saw as an emerging cult of ‘originality’ whose values were drawn from a neo-romantic fixation on ‘inspiration’ and vanguardism, and a desire that new psychological fiction (Woolf, Joyce and Proust are particularly referenced) capture all that was subject to the senses in a given moment. For Wharton, this modernistic adoration of totality and aesthetic completeness was a hubris of sorts that found its style in the deployment of the uninterrupted, unimpeded Jamesian (William) ‘stream of consciousness’ that she loathed. Excluding materials from appearance in art, for Wharton, was not a withholding of one's right to see and feel all things, but was, rather, a generous and humble exercise that not only made art ‘better’ in her view, but also opened it up to other potentialities. These potentialities were experienced by the reader as a democratising sense of wonder as to how things might be different through the deployment of a different form or focus of attention. Rather than relying on the energy of the creative writer to capture all things at all times, Wharton's theory of art created drama through a certain exercise of modesty that could provoke the reader's contemplation as to other possible outcomes, forms and ways of being.

George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) is not generally considered to be a political novel. That appellation is instead bestowed most often on Felix Holt, the Radical, with Romola usually not far behind. Published in fourteen monthly parts between July 1862 and August 1863 in Cornhill Magazine, Romola explores fifteenth-century Florentine republican politics through the anti- Papist reform championed by Girolamo Savonarola and the competing vision of Niccolò Machiavelli. The novel was, in George Henry Lewes's characterisation, ‘flatly received by the general public though it has excited a deep enthusiasm in almost all the élite’ (Haight 1968: 4, 102). This was certainly an overstatement. Stung by the criticism of Romola, Eliot returned to the English Midlands with Felix Holt. John Morley likely spoke for many in literary and intellectual circles when he insisted in a review of this later novel that, although the public holds no right to lambaste a writer for changing characters or locales, ‘we may still rejoice that she has again come back to those studies of English life, so humorous, so picturesque, and so philosophical, which at once raised her into the very first rank among English novelists’ (1866a: 723). Accustomed to Eliot's depictions of English rural life in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, reviewers and readers had simply baulked at her experiment.

Yet Romola and Felix Holt share an underlying concern. In Romola, Eliot attempts to think through the democratic reforms undertaken in her own time by displacing them onto a different country and an earlier era. In Felix Holt, which was written against the backdrop of parliamentary debates surrounding a further extension of the franchise, she explores the consequences of the Great Reform Act of 1832 on the fictional market town of Treby Magna. Harold Transome, the Tory landowner who cynically runs on a platform of reform, and his electioneering agent Matthew Jermyn are positively Machiavellian in manipulating the ‘faith in the efficacy of political change’ unleashed by the first Reform Act (Eliot 1871: 203).

In his seminal work on Stardom in Latin America, John King states that ‘there is critical consensus that we can speak of stars in the 1930s and 1940s. The case is not clearly made for actors or actresses after, say, the mid-1950s’ (2003: 148). In this vein, he further questions ‘whether the term “star” is the right one to use for the many prominent actors working in national cinemas throughout the region in the past fifty years’ (2003: 148). While there is no longer a managed or vertical system as used to be the case in Argentina during the Golden Age – hence the challenges of talking about a ‘star system’ in the region today – undoubtedly there are still a number of figures who possess a set of extraordinary qualities that single them out for stardom and distinguish them from other film performers (Shingler 2012: 90–91). In general, those qualities have been defined as sitting within the realm of ‘glamour, charisma, and desire’ (Qiong Yu 2017: 1; Shingler 2012: 90–91). Yet, as recent studies on Cult Film Stardom (Egan and Thomas 2013), Ageing Stars (Swinnen and Stotesbury 2012) and the expansion and transformation of Star Studies (Qiong Yu and Austin 2017) demonstrate, there exist different types of stardom that do not necessarily involve those characteristics.

With the aim of offering an expanded contemporary notion of stardom, Susan Hayward (2006) suggests that the star ‘is representative of both normality and “acceptable” excess’ (Qiong Yu 2017: 3). The actors and actresses who will be in focus in what follows negotiate the tension between these poles and, to paraphrase Qiong Yu, they ‘[highlight] the performativity of Stardom’ (2017: 19). Informed by the ‘polycentric vision’ proposed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994/2014) in their groundbreaking monograph Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, this chapter moves away from a Hollywood-centric approach that would locate Latin American and, more specifically, Argentine Stardom, in the periphery – or as ‘non-stardom’. As they state, ‘the world has many dynamic cultural locations, many possible vantage points’ and ‘no single community or part of the world, whatever its economic or political power, should be epistemologically privileged’ (2014: 48).

1 Causa sui as the Real Movement of the Production of Reality

For Spinoza, the problem of the unity of Nature is the problem of immanent causality. God is productive force, and this force is life itself. This is quite different from how Renaissance thinkers defined life: an irrational and obscure élan vital that necessarily implies contingency. Spinoza cannot accept this definition, since, for him, ‘things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced’. This argument is based on the identity of God's power and essence, already implied in the identification of God, cause of all things, with God, cause of itself:

The problems of a self-caused existence and infinity, or indetermination, are the same. Both are the absolute expression of an existence that includes the production of particular things. God cannot be the absolute expression of existence without also being the absolute expression of the existence of singular things. Precisely because ‘the absolute affirmation [affirmatio] of existence’ is at the root of being (real Being itself as absolutely infinite), there can be no chance; only this world could have ever existed. It is also why only this rationality can exist, which finds its raison d’être and necessity in the absolute affirmation of existence itself, in God's absolutely infinite nature. This explains how Spinoza can write to Hugo Boxel that ‘the world is a necessary effect of the divine nature and was not made by chance’. By ‘chance’ (fortuito), Spinoza means some failure to reach a goal, a deviation from the projected and originally pursued end. Chance refers to the unintended and unwanted effect of an action, a discrepancy between the pursued goal and the obtained result. In a teleological conception of the production of things, the notion of chance has the negative connotation of a deviation. Boxel defines chance in the following way: ‘something is said to have been made by chance when it does not originate from the agent's intention’. Spinoza uses the notion comparably: ‘in creating the world God had one goal, and [yet] he went completely outside the goal he had’.

Along with male writers like Byron and Shelley, Romantic women writers including Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre, Ann Radcliffe, and many others faced the consolidation of British national identity and the emergence of British imperialism as propellants for their writing. The white-male dominant literary tradition they entered was undergoing political, cultural, and aesthetic changes while they situated themselves and their positionalities in shifting notions and expectations of women authors. They grappled with increasingly global frameworks for literary production and placed themselves and their works within new Orientalist frameworks.

Women writers of the Romantic era tend to fall into several genres with Orientalist affinities, including the novel, the romance, and lyric poetry. Across these genres, prominent Orientalist tropes include fantasy, escapism, cross-cultural identification or sympathy, and later in the period, fear and antipathy. For many writers, Orientalist settings and representations became veiled projections of contemporaneous military and political struggles of the growing British Empire. For example, Felicia Hemans, the most widely read woman poet of the nineteenth century, was fascinated from a young age by stories of the Peninsular War. Hemans's upbringing in a military family propelled her to write Tales and Historic Scenes (1819) and Records of Woman (1828), both of which represent women speakers through culturally diffuse and oftentimes Orientalist settings. Hemans's imagined global settings raise the question of a writer's responsibility or role in cultural production. Specifically, the ethics of representation in relation to the writer's identity—who/what they can or should represent in writing—is significant in reading Hemans's poems about women speakers from around the world. These questions feed into the larger examination of literary invention versus factuality in Orientalism and racial representation.

As a celebrated “poetess” figure of transatlantic celebrity, Felicia Hemans is known for creating imagined communities of women-centered poems, but the ethnic and racial logics of her global imagination have not been fully excavated.

Television was imported from the USA to Argentina in 1951 by media tycoon Jaime Yankelevich, who made a deal with the government to broadcast the first transmission on 17 October, as part of the national commemoration day known as ‘Loyalty Day’, which marks Perón's release from prison in the wake of massive labour strikes and the origin of Peronism (Taquini and Trilnick 1993: 11). The fact that Darín appeared in a TV programme for the first time just a few years after this date, when he was still a baby, makes him a true ‘television native’, who has observed almost literally from the cradle the challenges that the new medium represented for established actors and actresses (Valdéz 2011). By the time he reached his twenties, he had spent most of his life in television studios and was very comfortable in that environment, surpassing any of the challenges experienced by his predecessors. It was in those years, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, when he became a TV celebrity, and when his small-screen fame and personality started to feed into his film and theatre performances. In relation to this should also be noted – as Tierney, Ruétalo and Ortiz do in their study on new Latin American Stardom (2017) – the important role played by television in determining stardom in national contexts. And, as they correctly explain, ‘this is particularly the case’ when it comes to ‘Latin American television's most popular format, the telenovela’ (2017: 165).

Most performers in Latin America who have reached a high level of public recognition and have crossed over to become big film stars have passed through the rite of passage of telenovelas. In recent decades, with the upsurge of Latino demographics in the USA, this tendency has also had a strong impact in Hollywood. In 2013, NBC Latino reporter Nina Terrero explained that ‘over the last ten years, novela exports from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and other Latin American countries have dominated the U.S. Hispanic television market, creating an avenue for scheming villains, lovelorn hunks and poor maids to become Hollywood heavyweights’.

Duration in Metaphysical Thoughts

The Essence of Duration

In the appendix to Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, the distinction between duration and eternity is organised around the division ‘of being into being whose essence involves existence and being whose essence involves only possible existence’. Possible, here, is not to be taken as contrary to necessary, for strictly speaking, everything is subject to the necessity of divine law. Spinoza takes great care to specify that ‘possible and contingent signify only a defect in our knowledge about a thing's existence’. ‘A thing is called possible, then, when we understand its efficient cause but do not know whether the cause is determined.’ In this respect, it is hardly surprising that the origin of duration seems obscure, since it is linked to the problematic concept of possible existence. Consequently, an elucidation of its nature presupposes an analysis of the reasons for our ignorance, reasons that explain why we perceive as merely possible what is really necessary. Possibility and contingency are not affections of things, but testify to a weakness of our intellect, for if we perceive the existence of an efficient cause and thereby acquire the conviction that the thing is not impossible, we cannot therefore conclude with certainty that it will inevitably be produced, since we do not know if this cause is determined. If everything is necessary, how is it that we are kept in such a state of ignorance, seeing the indeterminate instead of the determinate? Logically, if we know the efficient cause, namely God, without which nothing could be conceived, we must infer that the effect follows from it. Why don't we manage to deduce the necessity of a thing's existence when its efficient cause is given? And why do we limit ourselves to envisaging the existence of the thing as merely possible? This weakness of our power of knowing stems from the fact that the existence of a created thing does not depend on its essence and is not contained in it. In itself, the essence has no necessity, for it is also created by God and ‘depends on the eternal laws of nature’. The thing's existence is subordinated to God and more specifically to ‘the series and order of causes’.

When Mary Russell Mitford began publishing her sketches of provincial life in the Lady's Magazine beginning in September 1822, she did so anonymously. Mitford appended a single initial at the end, ‘M’, or, inexplicably and misleadingly, ‘K’. Others included no attribution at all. As I noted in Chapter One, anonymity facilitated Mitford's ability to write for multiple periodicals without accruing a reputation for being a hack. While she aspired to be a historical dramatist, staging her plays was fraught with difficulties. By contrast, the Lady's Magazine and, to a lesser extent, other periodicals and annuals, offered her comparatively steady remuneration. ‘Many writers began their careers in this way’, Adrian Room has argued of anonymity, ‘believing that if what they wrote was worth reading, the public would buy it for its own sake, irrespective of whoever the author might be’. ‘But there is a snag’, Room continues. ‘If your work has no name to it, how can the public obtain more if they want it?’ (Room 1988: 26). In Mitford's case, she developed an easily recognisable narrative voice: acerbic, ironic, ambivalent.

She also developed a signature topos. Almost all her topographical sketches, distinguished from the studies of character examined in the preceding chapter, include some version of a country walk. In the early years, Mitford's narrator was often accompanied on these local expeditions by a young neighbour who is frequently at her side, as well as her dog, Mayflower (Figure 2.1). While wandering through the village with her companions, the narrator encounters neighbours, registers architectural differences among houses, remembers anecdotes, and delights in fall foliage or gets caught in spring showers. The very features of Mitford's sketches that have struck literary critics as ‘slightly simpering’ or ‘anodyne’ (Aslet 2010: 200; Gifford 2020: 134) registered very differently for her contemporaries. For, as Harriet Martineau insisted at mid-century, while looking back on her own childhood in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Mitford had invented – as I have noted earlier – ‘a new style of “graphic description” to which literature owes a great deal’. Before Mitford took up her pen, Martineau avers, ‘there was no such thing known … as “graphic description”’.

In this chapter I focus on Byron's Eastern Tales, published in the period between the second and third cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. I explain how Byron's constructions of the lyric subject are forged directly by his early-career aesthetic and Orientalist inventions in his Eastern Tales. These racialized constructions provoke the development of Byron's “cosmopolitan” Romantic subject and its “Oriental” counterpart, a counterpart that serves to reinforce Byron's increasingly deracinated cosmopolitanism. I will show how this cosmopolitanism depends on a textualized and simulated “East”—a space of disidentification and defamiliarization that gestures back to Byron himself as an Orientalized figure. As a result, the Byronic subject ultimately inhabits a racially and ethnically flattened space such that neither the “Orient” nor the “world” is imaginable without the other.

Sir William Jones's description of “the finest parts of poetry” as “expressive of the passions” and “operat[ing] on our minds by sympathy” lends force and warrant to the eventual Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings that Byron deploys and re-imagines in the Eastern Tales (“On the arts, commonly called imitative” 216). Jones's description of the poets of the “Eastern nations” as “excel[ing] the inhabitants of our colder regions in the liveliness of their fancy, and the richness of their invention” (77), points to the “East” as a site of not only aesthetic novelty but an entrenchment of colonial, imperial, and racial logic. This logic makes the aesthetic act of turning to the “East” an appropriation of the “fancy” and “invention” of the East. The geographic “East” is discarded for an ornamental space of projection, one that writers like Byron capitalize upon to propel his early celebrity, or as Lady Byron called it, “Byromania.”

While cantos I and II of the Pilgrimage inaugurated Byron's celebrity, it was the Eastern Tales that followed—The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), and Lara (1814)—that garnered him popular literary acclaim and readership. Multiple editions and reprints of these four tales turned Byron into not only a literary brand name but also a celebrated Orientalist.

James Huneker is now a somewhat neglected figure in the pantheon of American literary and critical achievement. In his time though (from the 1890s through to his death in 1921) he was perhaps the USA's most revered and respected cultural critic, occupying a position that would eventually, perhaps, be taken by the presently-more-famous H. L. Mencken. A passionate and relentless advocate for cosmopolitanism in art, literature and politics, and opposed to the rising nationalistic fervours of the 1910s that I spoke about in the previous chapter, he was also an unapologetic champion of bohemian morals and a critic of the Puritanical sexual pieties of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. His life-long bohemianism, campaign for the improvement of aesthetic and cultural values in American literature and art, and wide, international reading might make Huneker an obvious candidate for a position within the fold of the emerging ‘high modernism’; or, at the very least, as one of its clear progenitors. Yet, Huneker is more a figure of the transitional (but no less distinct) moment I have outlined in this book. Indeed, he shared with Edith Wharton (who adored his writings on music and theatre especially) and others a suspicion about the meaning and direction of so-called ‘modernism’ and its various sub-cults in the arts. Moreover, Huneker was quite assuredly the inheritor of the variant of cultural critique associated with José Martí, whom he followed into the major role of society and culture critic at The New York Sun.

In his 1919 novel Painted Veils (a borderline pornographic romp through the theatre and opera world of Gilded Age New York), Huneker pokes fun at the then current vogue for forms of ‘primitivism’, anthropological deep reading, and esoteric orientalism as so much pseudo-intellectual chaff covering more base needs and desires. The novel, which follows the sexual and social exploits of a popular opera singer, Esther Brandés, and her melancholic man-about-town suitor Ulick Invern through a plot involving religious revivals that transform into orgies, orgies that transform into near-religious revivals, and a whole parade of chorus girls in various bohemian locales, opens by calling out the misogyny and voyeurism of literary and artistic history.