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.
- ISBN10 0691012059
- ISBN13 9780691012056
- Publish Date 11 January 1998
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 January 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 232
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/6236.html