Stardom: Discussions on Fame and Celebrity Culture

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2012. Celebrity culture has received serious scholarly attention in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the concepts of fame, stardom, and popularity are no longer of interest to tabloids only, the phenomenon of celebrity has been studied, among others, by historians, literary critics, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and economists. Scholars included in this volume discuss the various shades of fame and celebrity-hood from historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives. Stardom: Discussions on Fame and Celebrity Culture critically comment on the ways of producing and consuming fame, the cult of personality (deserved or underserved) and the question of gender in celebrity culture. Ultimately the post-conference volume attempts to answer the fundamental question of what constitutes and entails being a ‘celebrity.’