Measurement and correlates of celebrity culture hate.

Before Walt Whitman became the self-celebrating poet of Leaves of Grass, he was a professional journalist. This paper examines the journalism Whitman produced from 1840 to 1842 in the context of an emerging celebrity culture, and it considers celebrity's effects on the public sphere. It traces the penny press's personal style of journalism to both its artisan-republican politics and the formation of celebrity culture, in which celebrities assume status parallel to that of traditional representatives of authority. As editor of the Aurora, Whitman adopts the first-person, polemical style of the penny press and singles out prominent people for criticism. In other pieces, he presents himself as the ever-observant flâneur. As editor and as flâneur, he is a participant in and observer of the life of his community, and he assumes unassailable interpretive power. But he also regards his readers as fellow participants-observers who make judgments about the public figures he reports on. The tension between these positions is never resolved: Whitman's dialogic addresses to readers aim to extend the public sphere of critical debate even as Whitman holds steadfastly to his own social and political authority. Encouraging and modeling readers' negotiations over the meaning of public figures, he extends the features of celebrity culture to the public at large. His early journalism shows how and why it is so difficult to reconcile political and social community in the era of mass culture, and it highlights the complexities of the coexistence of celebrity and critical discourse in the personal public sphere.

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Book Review: Paparazzi: Media Practices and Celebrity Culture by Kim McNamara

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly ◽

10.1177/1077699018759095 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 95 (2) ◽

pp. 551-552

Author(s):

Roy S. Gutterman

Keyword(s):

Celebrity Culture ◽

Media Practices

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Brady and Hindley: Serial Killers and Celebrity Culture

Serial Killers and the Media ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-04876-1_6 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 89-114

Author(s):

Ian Cummins ◽

Marian Foley ◽

Martin King

Keyword(s):

Serial Killers ◽

Celebrity Culture

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Kim McNamara, Paparazzi: Media Practices and Celebrity Culture

European Journal of Communication ◽

10.1177/0267323116670808a ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 31 (5) ◽

pp. 614-614

Keyword(s):

Celebrity Culture ◽

Media Practices

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Starring Women

10.5622/illinois/9780252043352.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Sara E. Lampert

Keyword(s):

Gender Ideology ◽

Family Structures ◽

Atlantic Seaboard ◽

Patriarchal Family ◽

Celebrity Culture ◽

Public Figures ◽

White Middle Class ◽

Women's Lives ◽

Women And Girls ◽

And Gender

Star actresses and dancers were among the most publicly visible, celebrated, and often polarizing female public figures in the early United States. This book examines the careers and celebrity of the women and girls from Europe and America whose fame drove the growth and transformation of theater between 1790 and 1850 from the Atlantic seaboard to the trans-Appalachian West. Starring women introduced new repertoire—melodramas, breeches roles, dance pantomime and ballet—that catalyzed debates about social ownership of American culture, regional and national identity, and women’s place in public life. This book transforms existing understandings of early U.S. theater and culture by examining a broad cohort of understudied figures and argues that women stars were vital to the development of transatlantic and U.S. entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Most significantly, starring women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of changing nineteenth-century gender roles. As this book demonstrates, even while they achieved unprecedented levels of wealth and prominence through the “starring system,” the patriarchal family structures that governed women’s lives and careers conditioned their participation in the industry. The celebrity culture that expanded from the 1820s demanded that starring women conform to new standards of sentimental domestic femininity, even as the structural realities of their lives defied such standards. Starring women were exceptional figures who mapped the margins of a narrowing white middle-class domestic ideal.

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