Celebrity Culture and the American Dream Stardom and Social Mobility [Paperback]

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first editions examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in todays celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.

1. The American Dream: Celebrity, Class, and Social Mobility 2. Beyond Subsistence: The Rise of the Middle Class in the Twentieth Century 3. Prosperity and Wealth Arrive: Boom Times and Womens Suffrage in the 1920s 4. Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps: Personal Failure and the Great Depression 5. Were all in this Together: Collectivism and World War II 6. Suburban Utopia: The Postwar Middle-Class Fantasy 7. Is That All There Is? Challenging the Suburban Fantasy in the Sixties and Seventies 8. Massive Wealth as Moral Reward: The Reagan Revolution and Individualism 9. Success Just for Being You: Opportunity in the Internet Age

Students will find this book (infused with history, sociology, communication, as well as gender and cultural studies methods) both accessible and engaging. Sternheimers descriptions and arguments lend themselves to lively discussion about the evolution of celebrity and what that meant then and now for American society more broadly.

-Sarah K. Fields, Communication, University of Colorado, Denver

The new edition of Karen Sternheimer's groundbreaking text could not arrive at a more opportune tilCå