The increasing interdependence of aesthetics and economics in recent decades has created ideological conditions for the intensification of celebrity culture. As a result, celebrity culture has ceased to be of interest only to the tabloids and the people that consume them; its analysis permeates all disciplines of study, including literary studies. As pointed out by James F. English and John Frow, while celebrity in the world of literature differs from celebrity in the areas pertaining towards sports and entertainment, what they do have in common is that they are created outside the immediate domain of recognition, they are created in the press and on television. Celebrity authors are “not simply successful or acclaimed novelists; they are novelists whose public personae, whose ‘personalities,’ whose ‘real-life’ stories have become objects of special fascination and intense scrutiny, effectively dominating the reception of their works” (English and Frow 2006: 39). According to English and Frow, celebrity authors are usually those who occupy the middlebrow position (between high and mass literature) and the tension between these two often results in charges of inauthenticity and selling-out on the part of an author whose popularity is thought incommensurate with true literary genius. Within pop culture this conflict does not exist because there celebrity is an uncomplicated way of selling product. There may be a figure of the moderately commercial writer, to whom certain anonymity attaches. Yet it is also created by a matter of the careful management of a persona which continues to be seen as the source of value (50).

This paper aims to examine the functioning of “highbrow” writers in the contemporary celebrity culture and their attitude to the phenomenon of literary celebrity on the basis of Doris Lessing's autobiography Walking in the Shade (1997), her Nobel lecture “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize” (2007) and J.M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003). The literary activity of Doris Lessing (1919-2013) and J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940), who, as already highly acclaimed authors, gained international celebrity status after becoming Nobel Prize laureates, reflects the significant changes in the system of literary production.