Richard K. Fenn
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195143690
- eISBN:
- 9780199834174
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195143698.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Civil religion uses public religiosity, national holidays, and public education to guard against deviant and autonomous expressions of individualism. Civil religion seeks to co‐opt the heroes and ...
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Civil religion uses public religiosity, national holidays, and public education to guard against deviant and autonomous expressions of individualism. Civil religion seeks to co‐opt the heroes and celebrities, both living and dead, as representatives and defenders of the social order. However, in societies that lose their monopoly on the sacred, heroes and celebrities represent hitherto forbidden or hidden possibilities for selfhood and satisfaction. The less successful the churches and the nation are in institutionalizing the sacred, the less likely individuals are to surrender their autonomy in return for recognition and support from the larger society.Less
Civil religion uses public religiosity, national holidays, and public education to guard against deviant and autonomous expressions of individualism. Civil religion seeks to co‐opt the heroes and celebrities, both living and dead, as representatives and defenders of the social order. However, in societies that lose their monopoly on the sacred, heroes and celebrities represent hitherto forbidden or hidden possibilities for selfhood and satisfaction. The less successful the churches and the nation are in institutionalizing the sacred, the less likely individuals are to surrender their autonomy in return for recognition and support from the larger society.
Kenneth H. Craik
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195330922
- eISBN:
- 9780199868292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195330922.003.0006
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Chapter 6 considers the person as both agent and resultant of reputation. The person seeks to convey a particular social image to others while using feedback from others as a source of ...
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Chapter 6 considers the person as both agent and resultant of reputation. The person seeks to convey a particular social image to others while using feedback from others as a source of self-knowledge. General renown and approbation are seen as sources of social acceptance and social capital within a person’s community. This chapter examines the craft wisdom to be found in the professional realm of reputation management that is increasingly available to public figures, celebrities, and corporations. Publicity agencies offer proactive services to mold, circulate, and protect public visibility and image. False assertions may threaten our reputation, but we might also actually engage in undeniably disreputable conduct. For either case, a guild of specialists is ready to come to the rescue and provide reputation damage control.Less
Chapter 6 considers the person as both agent and resultant of reputation. The person seeks to convey a particular social image to others while using feedback from others as a source of self-knowledge. General renown and approbation are seen as sources of social acceptance and social capital within a person’s community. This chapter examines the craft wisdom to be found in the professional realm of reputation management that is increasingly available to public figures, celebrities, and corporations. Publicity agencies offer proactive services to mold, circulate, and protect public visibility and image. False assertions may threaten our reputation, but we might also actually engage in undeniably disreputable conduct. For either case, a guild of specialists is ready to come to the rescue and provide reputation damage control.
Julie Brown, Nicholas Cook, and Stephen Cottrell (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780197266175
- eISBN:
- 9780191865220
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266175.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
The radio programme Desert Island Discs has run almost continuously since 1942, and represents a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. In 2011, recognising its iconic ...
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The radio programme Desert Island Discs has run almost continuously since 1942, and represents a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. In 2011, recognising its iconic status, the BBC created an online archive that includes podcasts of all programmes from 1976 on, and many from earlier years. Based on this and extensive documentary evidence, Defining the Discographic Self: ‘Desert Island Discs’ in Context for the first time brings together musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars to reflect on the programme’s significance, its position within the BBC and Britain’s continually evolving media, and its relationship to other comparable programmes. Of particular interest are the meanings attributed to music in the programme by both castaways and interviewers, the ways in which music is invoked in the public presentation of self, the incorporation of music within personal narratives, and changes in musical tastes during the seven decades spanned by the programme. Scholarly chapters are complemented by former castaways’ accounts of their appearances, which give fascinating insiders’ views into how the programme is made and how its guests prepare for their involvement.Less
The radio programme Desert Island Discs has run almost continuously since 1942, and represents a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. In 2011, recognising its iconic status, the BBC created an online archive that includes podcasts of all programmes from 1976 on, and many from earlier years. Based on this and extensive documentary evidence, Defining the Discographic Self: ‘Desert Island Discs’ in Context for the first time brings together musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars to reflect on the programme’s significance, its position within the BBC and Britain’s continually evolving media, and its relationship to other comparable programmes. Of particular interest are the meanings attributed to music in the programme by both castaways and interviewers, the ways in which music is invoked in the public presentation of self, the incorporation of music within personal narratives, and changes in musical tastes during the seven decades spanned by the programme. Scholarly chapters are complemented by former castaways’ accounts of their appearances, which give fascinating insiders’ views into how the programme is made and how its guests prepare for their involvement.
Marjorie Garber
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823242047
- eISBN:
- 9780823242085
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823242047.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book explores language and argues that all words are inescapably loaded—that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming—and that such loading is what ...
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This book explores language and argues that all words are inescapably loaded—that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming—and that such loading is what makes language matter. The author casts her eye over terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to the humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are an array of essays, from the title piece, with its demonstration of the importance of language to our thinking about the world; to “Mad Lib,” on the concept of madness from Mad magazine to debates between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida; to pieces on William Shakespeare, “the most culturally loaded name of our time,” and the Renaissance.Less
This book explores language and argues that all words are inescapably loaded—that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming—and that such loading is what makes language matter. The author casts her eye over terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to the humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are an array of essays, from the title piece, with its demonstration of the importance of language to our thinking about the world; to “Mad Lib,” on the concept of madness from Mad magazine to debates between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida; to pieces on William Shakespeare, “the most culturally loaded name of our time,” and the Renaissance.
Nicholas P. Money
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195172270
- eISBN:
- 9780199790258
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195172270.003.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Microbiology
This chapter begins with an overview of the treatment of indoor molds by the national media, stories of celebrity victims of mold exposure, and the epidemic of lawsuits related to fungal growth in ...
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This chapter begins with an overview of the treatment of indoor molds by the national media, stories of celebrity victims of mold exposure, and the epidemic of lawsuits related to fungal growth in homes. The outbreak of lung bleeding among infants in Cleveland in the 1990s, and subsequent study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is another feature of this introductory chapter. Initial research identified the infants’ exposure to the mold Stachybotrys as the likely cause of their illness, but this conclusion was retracted later and remains highly controversial. Various approaches to assessing and treating mold growth are introduced to set the stage for the detailed discussion of every facet of the mold issue.Less
This chapter begins with an overview of the treatment of indoor molds by the national media, stories of celebrity victims of mold exposure, and the epidemic of lawsuits related to fungal growth in homes. The outbreak of lung bleeding among infants in Cleveland in the 1990s, and subsequent study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is another feature of this introductory chapter. Initial research identified the infants’ exposure to the mold Stachybotrys as the likely cause of their illness, but this conclusion was retracted later and remains highly controversial. Various approaches to assessing and treating mold growth are introduced to set the stage for the detailed discussion of every facet of the mold issue.
Myra S. Washington
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496814227
- eISBN:
- 9781496814265
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496814227.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This book examines the racialization of Blasians – mixed race people with Black and Asian ancestry – that neither sees them as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the ...
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This book examines the racialization of Blasians – mixed race people with Black and Asian ancestry – that neither sees them as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the problem of the colour line. The emergence of Blasian celebrities and the analyses of these stars acknowledges that to understand what and who is a Blasian means to first understand hegemonic notions of both Blacks and Asian/Americans. Contextualized against those dominant discourses Blasians explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialized categories. Multiracial people are just as capable as monoracial people of upholding hierarchies of identity, as well as dismantling those hierarchies. Thus, in this book Blasians do not escape race, or erase race, but they do deconstruct normative instantiations of identity. The presence, mobility, and utility of these multiracial celebrities within both U.S. and global racial schemas simultaneously realize and complicate potential alternatives to racial and racist paradigms. These mixed race stars draw attention to how risible and absurd the biological and cultural premises for racialization truly are, and demonstrate potential alternatives for affiliation that do not rely on genetic material.Less
This book examines the racialization of Blasians – mixed race people with Black and Asian ancestry – that neither sees them as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the problem of the colour line. The emergence of Blasian celebrities and the analyses of these stars acknowledges that to understand what and who is a Blasian means to first understand hegemonic notions of both Blacks and Asian/Americans. Contextualized against those dominant discourses Blasians explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialized categories. Multiracial people are just as capable as monoracial people of upholding hierarchies of identity, as well as dismantling those hierarchies. Thus, in this book Blasians do not escape race, or erase race, but they do deconstruct normative instantiations of identity. The presence, mobility, and utility of these multiracial celebrities within both U.S. and global racial schemas simultaneously realize and complicate potential alternatives to racial and racist paradigms. These mixed race stars draw attention to how risible and absurd the biological and cultural premises for racialization truly are, and demonstrate potential alternatives for affiliation that do not rely on genetic material.
Peter Knight
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624102
- eISBN:
- 9780748671199
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624102.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
As a seminal event in late twentieth-century American history, the Kennedy assassination has permeated the American and world consciousness in a wide variety of ways. It has long fascinated American ...
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As a seminal event in late twentieth-century American history, the Kennedy assassination has permeated the American and world consciousness in a wide variety of ways. It has long fascinated American writers, filmmakers, and artists, and this book offers a critical introduction to the way the event has been constructed in a range of discourses. It looks at a variety of historical, political, and cultural attempts to understand Kennedy's death. Representations include: journalism from the time; historical accounts and memoirs; official investigations, government reports and sociological inquiries; the huge number of conspiracy-minded interpretations; novels, plays and other works of literature; and the Zapruder footage, photography, avant-garde art and Hollywood films. Considering the continuities and contradictions in how the event has been represented, the author focuses on how it has been seen through the lens of ideas about conspiracy, celebrity and violence. He also explores how the arguments about exactly what happened on 22 November 1963 have come to serve as a substitute way of debating the significance of Kennedy's legacy and the meaning of the 1960s more generally.Less
As a seminal event in late twentieth-century American history, the Kennedy assassination has permeated the American and world consciousness in a wide variety of ways. It has long fascinated American writers, filmmakers, and artists, and this book offers a critical introduction to the way the event has been constructed in a range of discourses. It looks at a variety of historical, political, and cultural attempts to understand Kennedy's death. Representations include: journalism from the time; historical accounts and memoirs; official investigations, government reports and sociological inquiries; the huge number of conspiracy-minded interpretations; novels, plays and other works of literature; and the Zapruder footage, photography, avant-garde art and Hollywood films. Considering the continuities and contradictions in how the event has been represented, the author focuses on how it has been seen through the lens of ideas about conspiracy, celebrity and violence. He also explores how the arguments about exactly what happened on 22 November 1963 have come to serve as a substitute way of debating the significance of Kennedy's legacy and the meaning of the 1960s more generally.
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199744466
- eISBN:
- 9780199944163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744466.003.0008
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
Three boulders emerge as the turning points in 2008: celebrity metaphor, the Palin effect, and financial crisis. The first emerges at the end of July and showered radioactive dust over the Democratic ...
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Three boulders emerge as the turning points in 2008: celebrity metaphor, the Palin effect, and financial crisis. The first emerges at the end of July and showered radioactive dust over the Democratic Party's election campaign until, five weeks later, Barack Obama demonstrated his hero bonafides at his convention speech. Immediately afterward, the newly hopeful Democratic campaign was knocked off balance again by the energy burst of Sarah Palin as she exploded on the national scene. Then, even as ship Obama succeeded in righting itself—the half-life of the Palin effect was shorter than celebrity metaphor—the financial crisis loomed suddenly like a giant iceberg threatening to capsize both campaigns. The Republican craft listed dangerously, the Democrats' hardly founders. By early October, the rushing stream of the election had divided, marking the effective end of the 2008 campaign.Less
Three boulders emerge as the turning points in 2008: celebrity metaphor, the Palin effect, and financial crisis. The first emerges at the end of July and showered radioactive dust over the Democratic Party's election campaign until, five weeks later, Barack Obama demonstrated his hero bonafides at his convention speech. Immediately afterward, the newly hopeful Democratic campaign was knocked off balance again by the energy burst of Sarah Palin as she exploded on the national scene. Then, even as ship Obama succeeded in righting itself—the half-life of the Palin effect was shorter than celebrity metaphor—the financial crisis loomed suddenly like a giant iceberg threatening to capsize both campaigns. The Republican craft listed dangerously, the Democrats' hardly founders. By early October, the rushing stream of the election had divided, marking the effective end of the 2008 campaign.
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199744466
- eISBN:
- 9780199944163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199744466.003.0009
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
At no point during the 2008 election campaign did the John McCain image generate much dramatic force. When Steven Schmidt assumed control over image making in early summer, even he could not liven up ...
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At no point during the 2008 election campaign did the John McCain image generate much dramatic force. When Steven Schmidt assumed control over image making in early summer, even he could not liven up the image. Schmidt tried redressing the deficit of excitement by attacking the image on the other side. With the celebrity campaign running out of gas, Republicans needed to generate performative power from their own side. When McCain named Sarah Palin his choice for vice president, she officially assumed the junior partner position. Symbolically, however, the reverse was the case. The dimly lit McCain figure was plugged into the high-wattage image from Alaska. Palin had the dramatic power and the prospective political glory. Palin's paint job sparkled, and she was clearly built for power and speed. This new Republican model projected the right image, and she had many of the special features the public desired.Less
At no point during the 2008 election campaign did the John McCain image generate much dramatic force. When Steven Schmidt assumed control over image making in early summer, even he could not liven up the image. Schmidt tried redressing the deficit of excitement by attacking the image on the other side. With the celebrity campaign running out of gas, Republicans needed to generate performative power from their own side. When McCain named Sarah Palin his choice for vice president, she officially assumed the junior partner position. Symbolically, however, the reverse was the case. The dimly lit McCain figure was plugged into the high-wattage image from Alaska. Palin had the dramatic power and the prospective political glory. Palin's paint job sparkled, and she was clearly built for power and speed. This new Republican model projected the right image, and she had many of the special features the public desired.
Paul 't Hart and Karen Tindall
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199562992
- eISBN:
- 9780191701856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562992.003.0014
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
Many of us care about refugees and displaced children. Tens of thousands of us spend considerable amounts of time and money improving their situation. But few of us have been as effective in drawing ...
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Many of us care about refugees and displaced children. Tens of thousands of us spend considerable amounts of time and money improving their situation. But few of us have been as effective in drawing attention to these issues and keeping them on the agenda of political elites and institutions around the world as celebrities such as Angelina Jolie have been. Star power defies conventional accounts of democratic leadership. It epitomizes the notion of leadership dispersal, although not one that is the product of institutional design let alone constitutional foresight. It rests upon personal rather than institutional moral capital, that capital is derived from fame, dramaturgy, and personality marketing in the non-political sphere, rather than by democratic election, representation, and accountability.Less
Many of us care about refugees and displaced children. Tens of thousands of us spend considerable amounts of time and money improving their situation. But few of us have been as effective in drawing attention to these issues and keeping them on the agenda of political elites and institutions around the world as celebrities such as Angelina Jolie have been. Star power defies conventional accounts of democratic leadership. It epitomizes the notion of leadership dispersal, although not one that is the product of institutional design let alone constitutional foresight. It rests upon personal rather than institutional moral capital, that capital is derived from fame, dramaturgy, and personality marketing in the non-political sphere, rather than by democratic election, representation, and accountability.
Ralina L. Joseph
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479862825
- eISBN:
- 9781479818426
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479862825.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences ...
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Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse—the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color—in order to resist its very tenets. Black women’s resistance to disenfranchisement has a long history in the U.S., including struggles for emancipation, suffrage, and de jure and de facto civil rights. In the Michelle Obama era, some minoritized subjects used a different, more individual form of resistance by negotiating through strategic ambiguity. Joseph listens to and watches Black women in three different places in media culture: she uses textual analysis to read the strategies of the Black women celebrities themselves; she uses production analysis to harvest insights from interviews with Black women writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and she uses audience ethnography to engage Black women viewers negotiating through the limited representations available to them. The book arcs from critiquing individual successes that strategic ambiguity enables and the limitations it creates for Black women celebrities, to documenting the way performing strategic ambiguity can (perhaps) unintentionally devolve into playing into racism from the perspective of Black women television professionals and younger viewers.Less
Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse—the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color—in order to resist its very tenets. Black women’s resistance to disenfranchisement has a long history in the U.S., including struggles for emancipation, suffrage, and de jure and de facto civil rights. In the Michelle Obama era, some minoritized subjects used a different, more individual form of resistance by negotiating through strategic ambiguity. Joseph listens to and watches Black women in three different places in media culture: she uses textual analysis to read the strategies of the Black women celebrities themselves; she uses production analysis to harvest insights from interviews with Black women writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and she uses audience ethnography to engage Black women viewers negotiating through the limited representations available to them. The book arcs from critiquing individual successes that strategic ambiguity enables and the limitations it creates for Black women celebrities, to documenting the way performing strategic ambiguity can (perhaps) unintentionally devolve into playing into racism from the perspective of Black women television professionals and younger viewers.
Angelica Goodden
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199238095
- eISBN:
- 9780191716669
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199238095.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Though exile was meant to imprison her, it paradoxically gave Staël freedom as a thinker and writer, enabling her to be as active a dissident as any woman at that time was capable of being. Her life ...
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Though exile was meant to imprison her, it paradoxically gave Staël freedom as a thinker and writer, enabling her to be as active a dissident as any woman at that time was capable of being. Her life of absence and writing about absence and writing about absence — often in the extended sense of ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’ — generated a range of works of great literary richness and socio-critical importance. The way in which she combined liberalism, qualified feminism, and Europeanism with nationalism speaks especially loudly to readers today, however dated some of the literary vehicles of her thought may appear. As an outstanding writer and thinker in the ‘age of the celebrity’, she used her influence as a theoretical and practical activist to thwart tyranny (epitomized for her by the oppressive regime of Napoleon, who tried to restrict her mind and body and failed to do either). Exile, in her, generated experience and thence literature; so it became a tool she could use for disseminating the ideas that most effectively challenged despotism and best illustrated her abiding preoccupation with human freedom.Less
Though exile was meant to imprison her, it paradoxically gave Staël freedom as a thinker and writer, enabling her to be as active a dissident as any woman at that time was capable of being. Her life of absence and writing about absence and writing about absence — often in the extended sense of ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’ — generated a range of works of great literary richness and socio-critical importance. The way in which she combined liberalism, qualified feminism, and Europeanism with nationalism speaks especially loudly to readers today, however dated some of the literary vehicles of her thought may appear. As an outstanding writer and thinker in the ‘age of the celebrity’, she used her influence as a theoretical and practical activist to thwart tyranny (epitomized for her by the oppressive regime of Napoleon, who tried to restrict her mind and body and failed to do either). Exile, in her, generated experience and thence literature; so it became a tool she could use for disseminating the ideas that most effectively challenged despotism and best illustrated her abiding preoccupation with human freedom.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and with it the term ‘best-seller’ ...
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Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and with it the term ‘best-seller’ was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice, and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of such writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted in 1908 of having made more money from his pen than any previous author. This book presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century from 1870 to 1918, analysing authors' relations with the reading public and how reputations were made and unmade. It explores readers' habits, the book trade, popular literary magazines, and the role of reviewers, and examines the construction of a classical canon by critics concerned about a supposed corruption of popular taste. Certain writers became celebrities, and a literary tourism grew around their haunts. They advertised commodities from cigarettes to toothpaste; they also advertised themselves via interviews, profiles, and carefully-posed photographs. They paraded across North America on lecture tours, and everywhere their names were pushed by a new profession, literary agents. Writers' attitudes to religion still mattered in this period. At the same time, however, they exploited their position in the public eye to campaign on all manner of issues, including female suffrage, which saw authors ranged both for and against; and during the Great War many penned propaganda. This substantial book amounts to a collective biography of a generation of writers and their world.Less
Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and with it the term ‘best-seller’ was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice, and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of such writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted in 1908 of having made more money from his pen than any previous author. This book presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century from 1870 to 1918, analysing authors' relations with the reading public and how reputations were made and unmade. It explores readers' habits, the book trade, popular literary magazines, and the role of reviewers, and examines the construction of a classical canon by critics concerned about a supposed corruption of popular taste. Certain writers became celebrities, and a literary tourism grew around their haunts. They advertised commodities from cigarettes to toothpaste; they also advertised themselves via interviews, profiles, and carefully-posed photographs. They paraded across North America on lecture tours, and everywhere their names were pushed by a new profession, literary agents. Writers' attitudes to religion still mattered in this period. At the same time, however, they exploited their position in the public eye to campaign on all manner of issues, including female suffrage, which saw authors ranged both for and against; and during the Great War many penned propaganda. This substantial book amounts to a collective biography of a generation of writers and their world.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
As celebrities, writers received invitations to salons in aristocratic town houses or to country-house weekend parties. This excited mixed emotions, ranging from elation at being part of a socially ...
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As celebrities, writers received invitations to salons in aristocratic town houses or to country-house weekend parties. This excited mixed emotions, ranging from elation at being part of a socially exclusive circle to disgust at the sycophancy being practised. Writers whose attitudes and experiences are detailed in this chapter include J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, W. S. Blunt, Robert Browning, John Buchan, Thomas Carlyle, Marie Corelli, W. H. Davies, Elinor Glyn, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Francis Thompson, Hugh Walpole, Mrs Humphry Ward, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. During the Great War, readings by soldier poets and others were staged by aristocratic hostesses in aid of various charities; but writers had not been without their own salons or patronage networks. Attention is given to the weekly literary lunches at the Mont Blanc restaurant in Soho presided over by Edward Garnett, and to the Sunday parties given by Alice and Wilfrid Meynell at their Bayswater home.Less
As celebrities, writers received invitations to salons in aristocratic town houses or to country-house weekend parties. This excited mixed emotions, ranging from elation at being part of a socially exclusive circle to disgust at the sycophancy being practised. Writers whose attitudes and experiences are detailed in this chapter include J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, W. S. Blunt, Robert Browning, John Buchan, Thomas Carlyle, Marie Corelli, W. H. Davies, Elinor Glyn, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Francis Thompson, Hugh Walpole, Mrs Humphry Ward, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. During the Great War, readings by soldier poets and others were staged by aristocratic hostesses in aid of various charities; but writers had not been without their own salons or patronage networks. Attention is given to the weekly literary lunches at the Mont Blanc restaurant in Soho presided over by Edward Garnett, and to the Sunday parties given by Alice and Wilfrid Meynell at their Bayswater home.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter highlights commercial aspects of the cult of authorial celebrity. Well-known writers featured in product advertising, selling anything from toothpaste, pens, cigarettes, and pipe ...
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This chapter highlights commercial aspects of the cult of authorial celebrity. Well-known writers featured in product advertising, selling anything from toothpaste, pens, cigarettes, and pipe tobacco, to health tonics and whisky. Some even penned advertising slogans; others profited from merchandise associated with their creations — Beatrix Potter and Kate Greenaway dolls, toys, board games, cards, and wallpapers; Little Lord Fauntleroy costumes and Trilby hats. Authors' attitudes to the new medium of photography are also explored. They feared being caught off guard, while appreciating the publicity value of carefully posed (and touched-up) images for reproduction in popular papers and periodicals. Similarly they generally enjoyed sitting for famous portraitists and sculptors in order to be captured for posterity, although certain representations caused author and artist to quarrel. Among the writers discussed here are: Mrs Hodgson Burnett, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Kipling, George Du Maurier, George Meredith, George Moore, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, Francis Thompson, and W. B. Yeats.Less
This chapter highlights commercial aspects of the cult of authorial celebrity. Well-known writers featured in product advertising, selling anything from toothpaste, pens, cigarettes, and pipe tobacco, to health tonics and whisky. Some even penned advertising slogans; others profited from merchandise associated with their creations — Beatrix Potter and Kate Greenaway dolls, toys, board games, cards, and wallpapers; Little Lord Fauntleroy costumes and Trilby hats. Authors' attitudes to the new medium of photography are also explored. They feared being caught off guard, while appreciating the publicity value of carefully posed (and touched-up) images for reproduction in popular papers and periodicals. Similarly they generally enjoyed sitting for famous portraitists and sculptors in order to be captured for posterity, although certain representations caused author and artist to quarrel. Among the writers discussed here are: Mrs Hodgson Burnett, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Kipling, George Du Maurier, George Meredith, George Moore, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, Francis Thompson, and W. B. Yeats.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Another aspect of writers' celebrity status was the hero worship they attracted. Poets such as Swinburne and Tennyson were famed for their dramatic readings. Literary tourism developed, with fans ...
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Another aspect of writers' celebrity status was the hero worship they attracted. Poets such as Swinburne and Tennyson were famed for their dramatic readings. Literary tourism developed, with fans visiting authors' birthplaces, homes, or haunts. Many moaned about the invasion of privacy but many more cultivated attention. Autograph collectors pursued famous writers, who were also the recipients of a vast and varied correspondence arising out of their work. Fans named children and pet animals after favourite writers or their characters. Aspirant writers would seek out well-known writers in the hope of gaining encouragement and endorsement; but well-known writers equally abased themselves before the more distinguished, by signing memorial addresses or celebrating anniversaries. Writers featured here include J. M. Barrie, A. C. Benson, Samuel Butler, Hall Caine, Lewis Carroll, G. K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Silas K. Hocking, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, and H. G. Wells.Less
Another aspect of writers' celebrity status was the hero worship they attracted. Poets such as Swinburne and Tennyson were famed for their dramatic readings. Literary tourism developed, with fans visiting authors' birthplaces, homes, or haunts. Many moaned about the invasion of privacy but many more cultivated attention. Autograph collectors pursued famous writers, who were also the recipients of a vast and varied correspondence arising out of their work. Fans named children and pet animals after favourite writers or their characters. Aspirant writers would seek out well-known writers in the hope of gaining encouragement and endorsement; but well-known writers equally abased themselves before the more distinguished, by signing memorial addresses or celebrating anniversaries. Writers featured here include J. M. Barrie, A. C. Benson, Samuel Butler, Hall Caine, Lewis Carroll, G. K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Silas K. Hocking, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, and H. G. Wells.
Jane Naomi Iwamura
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199738601
- eISBN:
- 9780199894604
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199738601.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Celebrity defines a new authorial framework, as the Maharishi Mahesh and his Transcendental Meditation movement gain legitimacy through the guru’s association with well-known entertainment stars in ...
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Celebrity defines a new authorial framework, as the Maharishi Mahesh and his Transcendental Meditation movement gain legitimacy through the guru’s association with well-known entertainment stars in the 1960s. The spectacle of celebrity spiritual seekers lend a hyperreal dimension to American’s understanding of Asian religions as these media engagements surreptitiously offer the sense of a more direct encounter. This chapter offers close readings of the cover stories that appeared in American popular magazines and pays close attention to the high-impact images that accompanied the text. Representations of Mahesh could easily be divided into two camps, critical or reverent, and were informed by the generational perspective of both reporter and magazine. Despite an apparent cultural shift in attitudes toward Asian religious alternatives and celebrity endorsement, both youthful enthusiasts and their reluctant predecessors drew on Orientalist notions to make their case. The representation of India in press reports and Mahesh’s modern-day incarnation, Deepak Chopra, are also discussed.Less
Celebrity defines a new authorial framework, as the Maharishi Mahesh and his Transcendental Meditation movement gain legitimacy through the guru’s association with well-known entertainment stars in the 1960s. The spectacle of celebrity spiritual seekers lend a hyperreal dimension to American’s understanding of Asian religions as these media engagements surreptitiously offer the sense of a more direct encounter. This chapter offers close readings of the cover stories that appeared in American popular magazines and pays close attention to the high-impact images that accompanied the text. Representations of Mahesh could easily be divided into two camps, critical or reverent, and were informed by the generational perspective of both reporter and magazine. Despite an apparent cultural shift in attitudes toward Asian religious alternatives and celebrity endorsement, both youthful enthusiasts and their reluctant predecessors drew on Orientalist notions to make their case. The representation of India in press reports and Mahesh’s modern-day incarnation, Deepak Chopra, are also discussed.
Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn ...
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The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.Less
The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199270842
- eISBN:
- 9780191710292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270842.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter outlines two major cultural forms taken by biography in the 19th century, the biographical dictionary and the press article. It discusses Michaud's Biographie universelle, and traces ...
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This chapter outlines two major cultural forms taken by biography in the 19th century, the biographical dictionary and the press article. It discusses Michaud's Biographie universelle, and traces some of the debates about the standing of biography in relation to history as illustrated by Cousin and Renan. The biographical dictionary is discussed as an attempt to give the form a respectability that is under threat from a comparison with history. The role of biography as a journalistic genre promoting a culture of celebrity is discussed with examples from Mirecourt and its condemnation by Barbey d'Aurevilly. Both cultural forms provided a model against which literary versions of biography were obliged to measure themselves.Less
This chapter outlines two major cultural forms taken by biography in the 19th century, the biographical dictionary and the press article. It discusses Michaud's Biographie universelle, and traces some of the debates about the standing of biography in relation to history as illustrated by Cousin and Renan. The biographical dictionary is discussed as an attempt to give the form a respectability that is under threat from a comparison with history. The role of biography as a journalistic genre promoting a culture of celebrity is discussed with examples from Mirecourt and its condemnation by Barbey d'Aurevilly. Both cultural forms provided a model against which literary versions of biography were obliged to measure themselves.
Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622090873
- eISBN:
- 9789882206670
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622090873.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction ...
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Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction with international norms of celebrity production. The book comprises case studies from popular culture (film, music, dance, literature, the Internet); official culture (military, political, and moral exemplars) and business celebrities. The breadth of inquiry here illuminates the ways capitalism and communism converge in the elevation of particular individuals to fame in contemporary China.Less
Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction with international norms of celebrity production. The book comprises case studies from popular culture (film, music, dance, literature, the Internet); official culture (military, political, and moral exemplars) and business celebrities. The breadth of inquiry here illuminates the ways capitalism and communism converge in the elevation of particular individuals to fame in contemporary China.
