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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Celebrity Afterlife in American Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2017

OLINE EATON Open the ORCID record for OLINE EATON [Opens in a new window]
OLINE EATON*
Affiliation:
Department of English, King's College London. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

In modern life, we encounter stories of people with a frequency unfathomable even twenty years ago. In American culture, the lives of celebrities, in particular, have proven the dominant form of mainstream life-texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Dynamic, volatile and open-ended, celebrity lives are useful for examining the renegotiation and revision of biographical narratives within culture over time. In this article, I will use the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to analyze a specific life-story's flow through culture. Focussing upon the intersections between multiple stories in a given historical moment, this article will demonstrate the revision such intersections prompt and the ways in which those revisions reverberate through subsequent scholarship. The article will argue that these narrative corruptions should be accounted for when we use stories of lives as a mode of cultural analysis.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 317 - 332
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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