Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain [Hardcover]

In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays inMaking Starsinterrogate 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.Making Stars provides multiple perspectives on the simultaneous emergence of modern forms of life writing and celebrity culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Crossing multiple genres and media, contributors reveal the complex and varied ways in which these modern ways of thinking about individual identity mutually conditioned their emergence during this formative period.NORA NACHUMIis an Associate Professor in the Department of English and coordinator of the minor in Women’s Studies at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University in New York, NY. She is the author ofActing Like a Lady: British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Stageand has published essays and book chapters on female novelists, playwrights, pedagogy and film adaptation.

KRISTINA STRAUBis a Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author ofSexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology andDomestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between SlC,