celebrity
guest 2034
Historicisingcelebrity.pdf
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcel20
Celebrity Studies
ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20
Historicising celebrity
Simon Morgan
To cite this article: Simon Morgan (2010) Historicising celebrity, Celebrity Studies, 1:3, 366-368, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2010.511485
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2010.511485
Published online: 05 Nov 2010.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 887
Citing articles: 6 View citing articles
Celebrity Studies Vol. 1, No. 3, November 2010, 366–368
Historicising celebrity
Simon Morgan
School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Broadcasting Place A 214, Leeds LS2 9EN, UK
Historians have been relatively slow to pick up on the recent explosion of academic interest in the concept of celebrity, wary of applying potentially anachronistic categories to pre-twentieth-century contexts and perhaps discouraged by negative responses in the popular media (Holmes and Redmond 2010). Nevertheless, despite Lucy Riall’s observa- tion in History Today that ‘the history of celebrity has yet to be written’ (2007a, p. 41), the language of celebrity has increasingly begun to creep into historical writing, particu- larly with regard to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries1. This development has been most apparent in historical biography, where there has been a spate of books seek- ing to identify their subjects as ‘celebrities’ (for example, Foulkes 2004, Cowen 2007). While some of these give relatively little sense of the wider culture in which their subjects existed, a few of the more scholarly have made a genuine contribution to our understand- ing of that culture: particularly the extent to which their subject’s celebrity status was the result of a deliberate process of self-promotion and media manipulation, and how far they were simply objectified by an emerging mass culture based on print and mass-produced commodities (see Cunningham 2007, Riall 2007b, McWilliam 2007). These insights have been reinforced by historians working in more specialised fields, such as theatre history or history of art, who have identified a thriving culture of celebrity in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries linked to a burgeoning market for printed images of the famous (Luckhurst and Moody 2005, Postle 2005).
Historians therefore have much to learn from contemporary celebrity theory. However, a more rigorous approach to the past would also bring reciprocal gains for celebrity stud- ies itself. Many contemporary theorists, following early commentators such as Boorstin (1961, p. 45) and Shickel (1985, p. 25), assume that celebrity is essentially a twentieth- century phenomenon, and have paid little attention to historical celebrity cultures. Even those who have considered the historical context have largely been concerned with tracing the antecedents of celebrity’s contemporary manifestation, which is too easily assumed to be its definitive form. These accounts rely heavily upon Leo Braudy’s magisterial history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown (1986), with its influential thesis that fame became ‘democra- tised’ from the late seventeenth century due to the spread of print literature, the growth of civil society and the decline of the royal court as the primary arbiter of renown.
However, Braudy’s narrative of democratisation has not yet been subjected to a fully historicised analysis that pays attention to the contemporary social, economic and political
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1939-2397 print/ISSN 1939-2400 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2010.511485 http://www.informaworld.com
Celebrity Studies 367
structures which shaped the public sphere in which early celebrities emerged and existed. In particular, Braudy’s concentration on literary texts and changing ideals of fame tends to ignore the cultural practices through which audiences consumed and constructed the public personae of the famous. It also occludes the continued importance of established elites as cultural arbiters and the frequently oppressive role of the state in monitoring and shaping the sphere of civil society, whether through censorship or persecution. In contrast, a fully historicised account of celebrity would give cultural theorists a more rigorous historical underpinning for their analyses of contemporary society. Moreover, it would challenge the notion that contemporary celebrity is in itself unique, rather than being the unique configuration of a cultural and economic phenomenon that has occurred in many forms in other times and places.
Historicising celebrity may be desirable, but first it is necessary to persuade historians that celebrity is a concept worth bothering with. To that end, it is important to engage in more thorough debate about the historical uses of ‘celebrity’. In a longer piece on this topic, I suggest we start with three key claims (Morgan 2011): first, celebrity cul- ture is not simply a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon; by using the insights of modern celebrity theory we can identify earlier and specific historical moments when a recognisable celebrity culture existed. For example, Stella Tillyard (2005) and Lenard Berlanstein (2004) have identified vibrant celebrity cultures based around a growing pub- lic appetite for images and knowledge of famous individuals in eighteenth-century London and nineteenth-century France, respectively. Secondly, in accepting the first proposition, it is necessary to rethink the assumed relationship between celebrity and modernity. By adopting a less teleological standpoint it is possible to move away from understanding celebrity as essentially a product of late modernity towards seeing it as one of the key drivers of the modernisation process itself. By stimulating the production of consumer goods, printed images and periodical literature, celebrity played a crucial role in the growth of the public sphere, the emergence of consumer society and the global expansion of west- ern culture. Finally, the insights of celebrity theory may also be useful when applied to pre-modern or non-western contexts: after all, Braudy himself traces the urge to be unique, arguably a prerequisite of celebrity, back to Alexander the Great (Braudy 1986, chapter 2), while charismatic personality cults have been a feature of many societies around the world.
These claims are explored more fully in a forthcoming issue of Cultural and Social History which, as with this piece, aims to stimulate a more sustained and productive dia- logue between historians and celebrity theorists than has hitherto been the case. The mutual benefits will be seen in the opening-up of a new and exciting field of historical enquiry, and a greater appreciation of the insights that past celebrity cultures can provide into that of the present.
Note 1. For an exception see Fred Inglis’ A short history of celebrity (2010). Inglis self-identifies as a
cultural theorist rather than a historian, so his book does not necessarily invalidate my point that the discipline has as a whole has been slow to appreciate the value of celebrity studies.
References Berlanstein, L.R., 2004. Historicizing and gendering celebrity culture: famous women in nineteenth-
century France. Journal of Women’s History, 16 (4), 65–91. Boorstin, D., 1961. The image: or what happened to the American Dream. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson. Braudy, L. 1986. The frenzy of renown: fame and its history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
368 S. Morgan
Cowen, R., 2007. Relish: the extraordinary life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian celebrity chef . London: Phoenix.
Cunningham, H., 2007. Grace Darling: Victorian heroine. London: Hambledon Continuum. Foulkes, N., 2004. Scandalous society: passion and celebrity in the nineteenth century. London:
Abacus. Holmes, S. and Redmond, R., 2010. A journal in celebrity studies. Celebrity Studies, 1 (1), 1–10. Inglis, F., 2010. A short history of celebrity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Luckhurst, M. and Moody, J., eds, 2005. Theatre and celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan. McWilliam, R., 2007. The Tichborne claimant: a Victorian sensation. London: Hambledon
Continuum. Morgan, S., 2011. Celebrity: academic ‘pseudo-event’, or a useful concept for historians? Cultural
and Social History, 8 (1), in press. Postle, M., ed., 2005. Joshua Reynolds: the creation of celebrity. London: Tate. Riall, L., 2007a. Garibaldi: the first celebrity. History Today, 57, 8, 41–47. Riall, L., 2007b. Garibaldi: invention of a hero. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shickel, R., 1985. Intimate strangers: the culture of celebrity in America. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Tillyard, S., 2005. Celebrity in 18th-century London. History Today, 55 (6), 20–27.
