Intermedial Authorship

Kathrin Yacavone researches and teaches in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany. She is a media studies scholar and photography theorist with a particular interest in cross-media phenomena, including in photography and literature. She is the author of Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (Continuum, 2012), co-editor of Die Fotografie und ihre Institutionen (Photography’s Institutionalization) (Reimer, 2024), and editor of five special journal issues on topics such as collaborative authorship, the history and aesthetics of photoalbums, contemporary photography in France, and nineteenth-century portraiture. Her current research project concerns the cultural impact of generative AI in relation to the aesthetic category of style.

Learned and provocative, and broaching all sorts of fascinating questions, Intermedial Authorship reflects on the desire to know a text through a photograph of its author, a desire that especially exercised the literary culture of nineteenth-century France—and still preoccupies us today.

• AcknowledgementsNote on TranslationsList of FiguresIntroduction. Portraits of the Writer Across MediaChapter One. Photography, the Biographical Turn, and Literary Celebrity CultureChapter Two. Celebrity and Fame: Balzac and Early Photographic MediaChapter Three. From Singular Portraits to Mass-Reproduced Images: The Multi-Medial Celebration of HugolâtrieChapter Four. Baudelaire and Nadar: Photography, Posture, and Authorship as NotorietyChapter Five. Nadar and George Sand: In Search of the Iconic Author PortraitChapter Six. Portraits Between Old and New Media: Proust’s Literary Marketing StrategiesConclusion. Intermedial Authorship in the Era of Networked Imaging and Generative AIBibliographyIndex