Frederick H. White – författare

Literature is not only about aesthetics, but also almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the author’s prose. Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies focuses on the creation of symbolic capital for the literary legacies of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov that was eventually exchanged by cultural merchants for financial and ideological profit. Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White discuss the ways in which certain cultural merchants created symbolic meaning for these two authors through a process of collusion, consecration, and the marketing of tangible and intangible products that lead to some sort of transaction. The promotion and maintenance of posthumous legacies involves an intricate network of personal interests that drive the preservation of literary reputations.

Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev''s posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia''s leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness. Frederick White''s primary focus is A Book About Leonid Andreev (1922), the most important collection of memoirs dedicated to the Russian author, presented here in the first English translation. The agendas of the memoirists resulted in portraits that have influenced how Andreev is read and spoken about to the present day. White pays special attention to Andreev''s history of mental illness, which the memoirists described with vague terms such as "creative energy" or "inner turmoil." Past scholarship has focused on philosophical and sociological factors in the author''s life but this concentration on his mental health provides a fruitful approach to deciphering the literary portraits.