Performing Celebrity

Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Nora Nachumi, Kristina Straub, Nora Nachumi, Kristina Straub

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781644532676
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Nora Nachumi and Kristina Straub
• Part I. Representing Celebrity on the Stage and the Page
• Part II. Marketing Celebrity in the Material World
• Part III. Life Writing as Self-Defense
• Part IV. The Body and the Body Politic
• Part V. Whose Life is It Anyway?
• Notes on Contributors
• Index