Celebrity Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview

Abstract

The work done to date on the development of celebrity culture in the long 18th century ranges across fields as diverse as theater and criminology, art and boxing, and music and oral culture, as scholars examine how celebrity operates within discrete segments of the public sphere as well as across them. Celebrity studies is more than a simple description of a star’s popularity. Instead, it examines how personal, social, media, political, and economic events create local conditions of popularity, how a celebrity’s popular images circulate within a culture, and what the celebrity means to a culture; it also traces how concepts of merit and fame change over time. Individual studies of celebrities and the fans, audiences, and readers who admire them are joined by interdisciplinary studies that best capture the breadth of celebrity’s foundations and effects.

Beyond celebrity history: towards the consolidation of fame studies

“…Indeed, there has been a flood of articles and books fully dedicated to the excavation of 'early celebrity cultures' or less directly contributing to our understanding of past fame. Since the 1990s the field of theatre celebrity has experienced rapid development, particularly with regard to studies of the celebrated actresses, reaching as far into the past as the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (Wanko 2011). Coinciding with the publication of several key texts of gender theory in the 1990s (esp.…”

Laurence Sterne, Fame and Fashionable Disease

“…26 By making Joshua Reynolds's portraits more affordable and therefore more accessible, engravings could confer celebrity on his sitters; simultaneously, the popularity of the images and their subjects' social connections contributed to Reynolds's own celebrity, as Tim Clayton argues. 27 Prints could also be very expensive, but the diffusion and reproduction of the Reynolds portrait across many different venues overcame this initial high expense.…”