The seventeenth-century royalist book Eikon Basiliké (1649), probably the most successful political tract of the English revolution, was unlike any other royalist work published in the period. Its unique qualities suggest that it did something genuinely new. Those qualities may be best appreciated from the perspective of celebrity. While celebrity is ordinarily considered a modern phenomenon, the reception of Eikon Basiliké shows that the idea of celebrity arises in the early modern period, when a new relation between text and audience presented a commodified image of a famous person, an image that was consumed by its audience in a democratized marketplace. Ironically, Eikon Basiliké achieved commodification by relying on the traditional techniques of the art of memory—the fourth part of rhetoric—to create the illusion of closeness between king and subject that converted the king into a celebrity.

This essay proposes the celebrity of fictive bodies and seeks to understand how, and how far, certain fictional characters can stimulate an audience response analogous to that elicited by the flesh and blood. One of many “celebrity characters,” Shylock is useful to this discussion in regard to the historical development of his fame: Shylock on the eighteenth-century stage begins a new kind of fascination with this character. Seeking to explain that fact, the essay outlines aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical practice that enabled audiences to consider character apart from actor and then, to showcase this shift, develops two valences of the eighteenth-century response to Shylock—the tendencies toward judgment and conversion. Both responses demonstrate how a dramatic character invokes (and complicates) the tensions between public and private life that theorists have used to define celebrity appeal.

In this essay, I examine Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III (1699) to explore the intersections between celebrity and surveillance in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on vocabularies from performance studies, disability studies, theater history, and literary studies, I theorize a strategy of self-representation that England's first modern celebrities developed to maintain their fame while protecting their privacy from the spectators' anatomizing gaze. Cibber used his performance of Richard's disabled body to disrupt his spectators' attempts to characterize or categorize his identity. By displaying a body that demanded attention at the same time that it defied Enlightenment grammars of behavior—and by publishing literary self-representations littered with misspelled words and blotted pages—Cibber became an early practitioner of “overexpression,” a strategy that allowed him to make himself visible without becoming vulnerable to his public's attempts to interpret, dissect, and disseminate the secrets of his private life.

David Garrick, having achieved unprecedented fame in a world newly shaped and suffused by the daily press, conducted his career from a perception that no predecessor had had reason to grapple with and that scholars now are just beginning to explore: that newspapers had altered the cultural timescape—had extended indefinitely the now wherein performer and public might mesh with one another. At stake throughout Garrick's career was the question not only of what press and player might do to or for each other tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow but also of whether the not-altogether-poor player's reputation might outlast, in any way and to any extent, his corporeal hour upon the stage. The answers Garrick tried for—at once ingenious and incomplete—can help us calibrate the intricate relation between performance and documentation, at a moment when each was newly, powerfully inflecting the other.

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.

Oscar Wilde's Salome, composed in French in 1891, represents both an episode in the history of celebrity and a dramatization of celebrity's theatrical structure. The play first entered the orbit of stardom when Sarah Bernhardt, internationally hailed as the world's greatest actress, agreed to play the title role in 1892; its author had long been a celebrity, known as much for his artfully crafted persona as for his published writings. Bernhardt, Wilde, and Salome, a play in which almost every character is both fan and idol, were all defined by the volatile conjunctions shared by theatricality and celebrity: the asymmetrical interdependence of actors and audiences, stars and acolytes, exhibition and attention, distance and proximity, absolutism and democracy, exemplarity and impudence, worship and desecration, and presence and representation.

Is the fetish the only way to understand glamour, especially when it comes to the glamour of racialized women? How do we talk about agency and embodiment for a mediated figure? How does celebrity affect a subject whose body has been overembodied yet depersonalized? This essay suggests that the unlikely conjunction among celebrity, glamour, and racial difference may be the place where we are compelled to confront the intimacy, rather than opposition, between person-hood and objectification. Turning to Anna May Wong, an iconic “race beauty” in the early twentieth century, this essay argues that Wong's glamour is achieved neither through her apparently racialized performances nor through her uncomplicated assumption of female agency but rather through a paradoxical staging and erasure of her own body and skin. By asking how a celebrated body might operate subjunctively rather than materially, we can begin to question the imperatives of personhood that drive both celebrity and race studies.

Reactions in France to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's phenomenally successful film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) tend to fall into two groups. According to one perspective, the film is a superficial and racially sanitized form of cine-tourism; according to another, it is a profound and sincere celebration of traditional French values. For both groups, the cultural work the film performs coalesces around close-ups of the face of Audrey Tautou, the film's star. This essay asks how Tautou's face and the close-up shot it exemplifies can say so much while showing so little. By drawing on the theoretical history of camera distance, it argues that the formal design of the close-up, which demands simultaneously an analytic and an affective response to the visual image, usefully informs the relations between political reactions to the film and French debates around the question of national identity at the start of the twenty-first century.

When my first daughter was born a few years ago, I entered a celebrity news blackout, a somewhat discomfiting condition for a sociologist of celebrity. When she entered preschool, though, I resubscribed to Us Weekly and devoured its morsels like a starving man at McDonald's: Kim Kardashian and her then-boyfriend ate at Chipotle on their first date! Ashton Kutcher was mad about his neighbor's noisy construction! Lindsay Lohan is back in rehab! I felt less disconnected from others, comforted by the familiar company, a little dirtier and a little lighter.

In 1986, when the frenzy of renown was first published, let alone in the 1970s, when I first started working on it, little did I know that a few decades later fame and its history would be a subject of expanding academic study. After all, when I was in the midst of writing it, I was told by my agent that I had better hurry up and finish before no one was interested in fame anymore.

The national book award for nonfiction was given in 2010 to Patti Smith for her book just kids. Since Patti Smith is a rock star as well as a poet and “punk icon,” her heartfelt remarks at the awards ceremony did more for the book business than any other tribute could have done. Smith told the assembled guests that as a young woman working at the Scribner Book Store, shelving books emblazoned with the National Book Award logo, she had dreamed of writing such a book herself. She concluded her acceptance speech with an impassioned defense of the printed book: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book” (“National Book Awards—2010”).

“We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks,‘” he tweeted. “now we have the first one.” He'd been set up, he told reporters. His lawyer attributed the allegations to “dark forces,” part of a “greater plan” to discredit him (Harnden). The “we” (and “he”) in question was Julian Assange, a thirty-nine-year-old Australian and founder of the guerrilla media organization WikiLeaks, which dedicates itself to embarrassing governments and corporations through strategic leaks of classified and secret documents to the media. Assange has yet to be formally charged with anything, although he's currently under house arrest at the English country estate of one of his supporters and facing extradition to Sweden after allegedly sexually assaulting two women there. The women, both WikiLeaks supporters, did consent to have sex with him, but apparently not the kind of sex he had in mind. As one of them put it, “Not only was it the worst screw of my life, it was also violent” (qtd. in Davies).

In the brief span of 1952–68, Puerto Rico sped through its industrialization process. Middle-class residential construction dotted the city of San Juan. Hotels replaced the mansions along its Condado waterfront. The spanking new Medical Center promised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—Operation Bootstrap—desperately needed, as it endeavored to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual labor force to American capital. The “Golden Mile,” the financial district established in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey, emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. The mythic mall of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a cattle ranch that bred cows for the milk industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers and magazines were filled with consumer fantasies of every variety. Along with everything else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop star.

Refusing to fight the trojans because he will not countenance agamemnon's colonizing self-interest, achilles re-treated to his tent. All because Agamemnon did not want to give up a woman (Chryseis) and, when he is forced to do so, claims a woman who was part of Achilles's war bounty (Briseis). Suffering humiliation after injustice is not a fate that proud Achilles will endure, and he responds to this outrage with a signal act: retreat. In this moment, Homer's “brilliant Achilles,” famed military man and the “greatest hero of the Greeks,” becomes the first celebrity recluse in history (1.10). Achilles is the first figure to give the recluse a (heroic) place in the popular imaginary. We even have a phrase for Achilles's act, bequeathed to us as an accusation: sulking in one's tent. This popular expression is used to indict, often harshly, those who quit because they believe they have been unfairly treated. In leveling this charge, we implicitly side with Agamemnon, who accuses Achilles of the most dastardly military act: “Desert, by all means, if the spirit drives you home!” (1.204). As an expression, sulking in one's tent is ripe for mockery, redolent with puerile imagery, conjuring up scenarios in which spoiled children, obstreperous adolescents, or overindulged celebrities behave badly because they cannot get their way.