The Mechanics of Renown; or, the Rise of a Celebrity Culture in Early America. America.

[摘要] ;;The Mechanics of Renown;; begins with a question, ;;who was the first celebrity.” The answer requires an exploration of shifts in etymology and epistemology that over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, created a celebrity culture which would saturate print, performance, material and visual culture. In the process it reveals the origins of not only one of contemporary culture’s most important commodities, the celebrity, but clarifies the processes of the creation of an American popular culture that privileged consumerism, national circulation and at least the appearance of simultaneous and equal access to the products and opportunities of modern consumption.Between 1750 and 1850 there appeared in English-language print culture an increasing concern with private details about the lives of celebrated individuals— specifically their possession of genius, wit, humility, charity and self-discipline. This shift comprised the first of multiple in the meaning of renown—the celebrity as a way to publicly discuss and evaluate character. Over time, concern with their private lives increased—their relationships, habits of style, personal failures, travels and origins. Eventually, the stories about famous figures became so regular and expected within popular print culture, that they became a category of their own and the characters within them took on the shorthand descriptor ;;celebrity.” The discourse around them expanded to construct a celebrity culture, the second of the etymological and epistemological transitions this project outlines.Celebrities played a role in every aspect of the expanding consumer marketplace and material culture—influencing tailors, artists, artisans, and advertisers as well as journalists and audiences. Celebrity culture helped structure professionalization in entertainment, as well as promoted tourism and civic development. Celebrity culture inspired collective response, from the temperance movement to the tumult of theater riots, as the discourse around them provided a space for cultural, moral and social criticism. Historicizing celebrity in this way recovers it as a product of a particular time—one that can help differentiate the popular cultures of the past both from our own and each other, and to understand how they came to meld with and influence larger political, social and economic cultures.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Humanities

[关键词] History of Celebrity;Humanities;Social Sciences;History