In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of Blessington, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Meynell, and Marie Corelli negotiate the increasing demands for public revelation of the private self? How did gender shape the posthumous participation of women writers such as Jane Austen, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Christina Rossetti in celebrity culture? These and other important questions related to the treatment of women in celebrity genres and media, and the strategies women writers used to control their public images, are taken up in this suggestive exploration of how nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers achieved popular, critical, and commercial success.

Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.

Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, yellow journalism, and television, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from across the arts like Voltaire, Garrick, and Liszt were all veritable celebrities in their time, arousing curiosity and passionate loyalty from their “fans.” The rise of the press, new advertising techniques, and the marketing of leisure brought a profound transformation in the visibility of celebrities: private lives were now very much on public show. Nor was politics spared this cultural upheaval: Marie-Antoinette, George Washington, and Napoleon all experienced a political world transformed by the new demands of celebrity. And when the people suddenly appeared on the revolutionary scene, it was no longer enough to be legitimate; it was crucial to be popular too. Lilti retraces the profound social upheaval precipitated by the rise of celebrity and explores the ambivalence felt toward this new phenomenon. Both sought after and denounced, celebrity evolved as the modern form of personal prestige, assuming the role that glory played in the aristocratic world in a new age of democracy and evolving forms of media. While uncovering the birth of celebrity in the eighteenth century, Lilti's perceptive history at the same time shines light on the continuing importance of this phenomenon in today’s world.

Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.

Why are we fascinated by celebrities we’ve never met? What is the difference between fame and celebrity? How has social media enabled a new wave of celebrities? The Psychology of Celebrity explores the origins of celebrity culture, the relationships celebrities have with their fans, how fame can affect celebrities, and what shapes our thinking about celebrities we admire. The book also addresses the way in which the media has been and continues to be an outlet for celebrities, culminating in the role of social media, reality television, and technology in our modern society. Drawing on research featuring real life celebrities from the Kardashians to Michael Jackson, The Psychology of Celebrity shows us that celebrity influence can have both positive and negative outcomes and the impact these can have on our lives.

A look at England's larger-than-life figures in the 18th century shines a spotlight on contemporary celebrity