Rising Star

Celebrity personalities, who reign over much of our cultural landscape, owe their fame not to specific deeds, but to the ability to project a distinct personal image, to create an icon of the self. This book examines the roots of this particular form of celebrity.

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Celebrity personalities, who reign over much of our cultural landscape, owe their fame not to specific deeds, but to the ability to project a distinct personal image, to create an icon of the self. This book examines the roots of this particular form of celebrity, locating a prototype of the star personality in the dandies and aesthete literary figures of the 19th century, including Beau Brummel, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Oscar Wilde, and explores their peculiarly charged relationship with women and performance. The author argues that when fin-de-siecle aesthetes turned their attention to the new, "feminized" spectacle of mass culture, they found a disturbing female counterpart to their own highly staged personae.