Appendix 1

The lead vocalist of the Irish rock band U2, Bono, who is well-known for participating in global charity efforts, has said that celebrity is a kind of currency that needs to be used wisely (quoted in Assayas 2005: 103). The same could be said about stardom. Embedded in that currency there is an inherent cosmopolitanism that goes beyond the aforementioned debates on the transnational, global and international dimensions of a performers’ career. Even though cosmopolitanism ‘has a history of being associated with imperialism and colonial thought’ (Baban 2013: 135; Young 2001), in recent years there has been a growing body of literature that is rethinking the cosmopolitan ideal for a globalised world (Appiah 2006; Hiebert 2002), embracing ‘some fundamental values and qualities that connect us together despite our visible differences’ (Baban 2013: 136; Nussbaum 1996). It can be argued that part of those cosmopolitan tropes, when it comes to bringing together the stardom community, include scandals – with their power to unveil truths concealed behind the star image (deCordova 2001) – and the signifying power of the star to enact potential social, political and even economic change. These characteristics seem to be universal, beyond any specific industry, albeit normally being anchored in local particularities. As will be explored in the following pages, it is indeed the cosmopolitanism of the star/celebrity currency that reconfirms Darín as a star beyond his native nation.

Martin Shingler and Lindsay Steenberg have wondered about the place of the film star in what they called the ‘age of (digital) celebrities’ (2019: 446). The contemporary shift in cinema distribution, such as the rise of streaming platforms, and ‘the theatres of stardom and celebrity (e.g., the rise of social media)’ (2019: 446), generate new forms of interactions with the audience, further breaking down the boundaries between the private life and the public image of a star (Qiong Yu 2018; King 2015). Under these circumstances, whether scandals are still playing a role in the rise and fall of stars, and whether stars have enough power within global and national politics to really instigate social change, are key aspects we need to delve into to grasp the current effectiveness of the star currency.

Children have appeared on-screen since the early days of cinema. While to begin with these child actors were nothing more than part of the ensemble cast from the audience's perspective, with time they have gained popularity to the point of becoming real film stars. When analysing Scarlett Johansson's early career, Whitney Monaghan reminds us that the term ‘child star’ first came into use in the 1920s and 1930s classic Hollywood era (2019: 25). Back then, stars like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland conquered people's hearts. For some scholars, that generation in the thirties was the last of the big child stars (Holmstrom 1980). Jane O’Connor argues that now the term commonly describes ‘any and all children who achieve even a modicum of success in the entertainment world’ and who are described as such in the media (2008: 6). What remains then from the classic Hollywood period in the general public imaginary is the negative perception of child stars as tragic figures who have been exploited by their parents and the entertainment industry (O’Connor 2008: 1). Moreover, even today, such early successes into show business continues to blur the boundaries between childhood and adulthood and to challenge the career progression of young performers beyond their prominent child roles. According to Chad Newsom, this latter point is due to the fact that ‘child stars become famous for physical attributes that will rapidly change and character types they will soon outgrow’ (2015: 6). Those children who manage to stay in business do so only thanks to particular circumstances, such as good transitional roles that allow the audience to grasp their coming of age and accept their inclusion in the adult world. In line with this, Monaghan concludes that ‘Johansson's longevity within the film industry can perhaps be attributed to the fact that she did not attain celebrity status as a child, only gaining recognition as a star when she moved into adult roles’ (2019: 24). And to a certain extent the same can be argued about Darín, whose various roles as a child did not single him out but did provide him with the necessary skills to work as a performer in different media.

Literary representations of the East and other deployments of Orientalism signal an unprecedented shift in poetics and aesthetics during the Romantic period. This shift in orientation was in many ways a turn to the poetic self over the other. This turn to the self valorized the individual poet and the rhetoric of universal experience. It was in tension, however, with the rise of new literary forms, Orientalism, comparativism, and increasingly “global” frames of reference. Through these tensions, the Romantic period saw the rise of Western individualism and a white-male-dominant poetic tradition. This tradition forged a modern lyric subject reliant on and in contrast to the Oriental other. Through Orientalist difference, the Romantic poet became themself—a subject of world-facing, cosmopolitan, white associations. By foregrounding expression over imitation, newness over tradition, heterogeneity over uniformity, and hemispheres over national borders, British Romantic writers expressed and reimagined themselves, taking routes through a literary “Orient”—a fictive space of cultural, political, sexual, and religious differences postured as “Oriental” forms.

As translator, colonial judge, and poet, Sir William Jones occupies a broad, paradoxical framework of Orientalist interests and influence on the authors in this study. His public role as a judge and imperial representative in colonial India, and his eventual defense of the first “Governor-General of Bengal,” Warren Hastings, situate Jones as an unlikely progenitor of Romantic expressive theory. Not only law, but Jones was also a polyglot and philologist dedicated to the study of twenty-eight different languages throughout his life. After he moved to India to serve as a judge, he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and started the journal Asiatic Researches, creating lasting scholarly interest in what he called “Indology” and non-Western social sciences. After his death, the five editions of his works published between 1799 and 1810 show his significance and popularity, but only recently has Jones's impact on the literature and literary history of this period been acknowledged.

Eternity is undeniably a property of the existence of the absolutely infinite substance. Does this mean that it exclusively belongs to divinity? Whatever the case may be, if it belongs to God because its essence involves existence, it seems inappropriate to attribute this quality to a being whose essence only involves possible existence. It is for this reason, incidentally, that Spinoza puts forth a distinction between duration and eternity. ‘From our earlier division of being into being whose essence involves existence and being whose essence involves only possible existence, there arises the distinction between eternity and duration.’ Strictly speaking, eternity is the prerogative of substance and is deduced from the necessary character of its existence. At the same time, ‘created things’, according to the terminology of Metaphysical Thoughts, are said to endure and not go on forever (s’éterniser). They cannot, strictly speaking, be called eternal. Spinoza is very clear on this point. ‘Infinite actual existence pertains to God in the same way as infinite actual intellect pertains to him. And I call this infinite existence Eternity, which is to be attributed to God alone, and not to any created thing, even though its duration should be without beginning or end.’ How, then, can he affirm the eternity of the human mind in the Ethics? Does this constitute a shortcoming in the vocabulary, as an observation in Metaphysical Thoughts would suggest? ‘We are accustomed, on account of a defect of words, to ascribe eternity also to things whose essence is distinguished from their existence, as when we say that it does not involve a contradiction for the world to have existed from eternity; also we attribute eternity to the essences of things so long as we conceive the things as not existing, for then we call them eternal.’ Or is it rather a change in perspective, as the development in vocabulary would suggest? Keeping with his principles, Spinoza reserves the term eternity for God and attempts to demonstrate the mind's immortality. Yet, in the Ethics, he will no longer speak of the mind's immortality, but rather of its eternity. Must we then interpret this change as a misuse of language or as the definition of a real eternity?

If the Ethics were to end with the twentieth proposition of Part V, it would appear as the handbook for honest men desiring to attain the highest freedom and greatest happiness possible in this present life. Spinoza, however, does not close his reflections directly after the inventory of remedies for passional troubles and the means of affirming the power of the mind here and now. Having finished his examination of ‘everything which concerns this present life’, he ‘passes to those things which pertain to the Mind's duration without relation to the body’. The entire conclusion of the Ethics will thus be dedicated to demonstrating the eternity of the human mind or, more precisely, the intellect, since the imagination and memory perish with the body. We must note, however, that Spinoza does not break with his preceding analyses insofar as he had already prepared the ground for this demonstration. So, as corollary 2 of proposition 44 from Ethics II points out, knowledge of the second kind allows us to perceive things sub quadam aeternitatis specie, thereby paving the way for a grasping of the mind's eternity.

Still, this doctrine of salvation and the mind's eternity does not fail to surprise, for we know that in Metaphysical Thoughts Spinoza had reserved this property exclusively for God: ‘And I call this infinite existence Eternity, which is to be attributed to God alone, and not to any created thing, even though its duration should be without beginning or end.’ He did, by contrast, grant immortality to the human mind. Should we then consider the eternity of which he speaks in the Ethics to be only a variant of immortality, resembling a form of unlimited duration, as the wording of the scholium announcing the intention to analyse the duration of the mind without relation to the body suggests? If this is the case, then Spinoza would have strangely relaxed the function of this concept, for he would have broken his own admonition against assimilating eternity to a duration, even one without beginning or end. Or should we, on the contrary, take his reservations on this subject seriously and confer to finite modes the same eternity as substance? But to what extent can the finite share the lot of the infinite?

George Eliot was a toddler when Mary Russell Mitford first made her mark on the literary world, and she was just beginning to consider writing fiction when Mitford passed away in 1855. By contrast, Elizabeth Gaskell, who was ten years older than Eliot, encountered Mitford at the height of her popularity. The question is not, therefore, ‘Did Elizabeth Gaskell read Our Village’ but ‘When did she first encounter it?’ At the time that she set out to write the eight literary sketches for Household Words: A Weekly Journal Conducted by Charles Dickens that would later appear as Cranford (1853), Gaskell modelled not only her distinctive mode of publication on Mitford's work but also its content and form. She knew that Dickens would be particularly receptive to this approach. His own pieces that used walks as an armature formed the basis for the ‘Sketches of London’ series published in the Evening Chronicle between January and August 1835. They provided an urban counterpart to Mitford's country strolls. The last four in the series of fourteen appeared with the subtitle ‘Our Parish’, while the final sketch carried the phrase as its title. These irregularly published, but clearly related, sketches ‘form a kind of serial’ (Butt and Tillotson 2013: 41). As Mitford had done, Dickens subsequently collected these works, as well as others that had first appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and published them in bound form as Sketches by Boz.

When Dickens established Household Words he viewed the sketch form as a particularly appropriate genre of writing to fulfil his editorial aims. ‘To show to all, that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellent on the surface’, he writes in the first number, ‘there is Romance enough, if we will find it out’ (Dickens 1850: 2). As he put it to the biographer and critic John Forster in a letter dated 7 October 1849, Dickens sought submissions that were ‘as amusing as possible, but all distinctly and boldly going to what in one's own view ought to be the spirit of the people and the time’ (1981: 622). ‘Odd, unsubstantial, whimsical’ – these were the particular qualities of individual submissions that Dickens thought would be ‘just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for … [the reader’s] imagination, while it will represent common-sense and humanity’ (1981: 623).

This book is about turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literature's discovery that in the overwhelming complexity of everyday life was the key to imagining the future. More especially, it is about the way in which writing in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth sought to express the political possibilities that lay on the surface of the everyday in opposition to conservative forces that relied on historicising American experience by reifying difference so as to suppress a progressive imagination of the future. This new focus liberated American writing from its dependence on the Event as a key structuring principal of aesthetics and turned literary art towards questions of the anti-evental; the ongoing, unresolved, excessive and chronic quality of time. In contrast to the Romantic era's dependence upon the temporally organising principal of the spectacle, Progressive Era literature developed aesthetic practices that sought to find potential in the ongoing and immanent quality of lived experience.