Moving Memoir Across Markets and Media: A Study of Popular Memoir and Its Genre Effects

Norrick-Rühl, Corinna; Fuller, Danielle

Abstract

Memoir moves readers for genre-specific reasons, and memoir also moves across markets, languages, media, and fandoms. Despite its ubiquity and popularity, memoir is an under-researched genre in book history. Our article seeks to address this gap through a discussion of genre theory and the concept of “memoirification,” and then through a brief case study of how popular memoir moves between the anglophone and German-speaking markets. In our case study, we focus on mass-market, bestselling, celebrity-authored memoir. We argue that celebrity-authored memoirs are entangled within cross-media flows of profit, consumption and effects that are genre specific, including their embeddedness in celebrity (book) culture and multimedia fandoms. A second issue we address in this essay is that existing concepts for “long twenty-first century book studies” (Noorda/Marsden 2019) and “publishing studies” (Murray 2006) seem to ignore genre effects. Thirdly, we argue for the explicit consideration of celebrity and influencer culture when analyzing twenty-first century book culture.