Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition’s examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today’s celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.

What is celebrity? How do celebrities influence society? Why do we hang on their every word, tweet or status update? Celebrity Cultures offers a fresh insight into the field of celebrity studies by updating existing debates and exploring recent developments. From the PR campaigns of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, this book critically evaluates a number of diverse celebrity case-studies and considers what they reveal about contemporary global society. Taking into account issues such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, economics, politics and the media, the book draws upon a range of cultural theorists including Theodore Adorno and Jean Baudrillard. Over the course of ten richly illustrated chapters, the book: Draws upon sociology, cultural theory, media analysis and celebrity commentary to explore and re-evaluate the study of celebrity. Examines the international appeal of celebrity including examples from India, China, South Korea and Indonesia. Includes chapter introductions identifying key points and annotated further reading suggestions. Celebrity Cultures is an invaluable resource for students of celebrity, media and cultural studies.

It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.

Over the past few decades, the public obsession with celebrity has exploded. This fully-updated second edition investigates issues in celebrity culture from the paparazzi to politics, from voyeurism to self-perfection. Cashmore presents engaging case studies to analyse how social media has changed the nature of celebrity culture, and explore how we consume celebrity in today's society. This new edition also contains pullout quotes and chapter summaries for ease of comprehension and teaching.

In the 21st century celebrities and celebrity culture thrives. This book explores the much noted but little analyzed relationship between celebrity and crime. Criminals who become celebrities and celebrities who become criminals are examined, drawing on Foucault's theory of governance.

This volume explores the topics relating to celebrity culture by presenting varied expert opinions that examine many of the different aspects that comprise this issue.

Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. Celebrity and Power questions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of the new public intimacy: a product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. In a new Introduction for this edition, P. David Marshall investigates the viewing public’s desire to associate with celebrity and addresses the explosion of instant access to celebrity culture, bringing famous people and their admirers closer than ever before.

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

The interrelationship between fashion and celebrity is now a salient and pervasive feature of the media world. This accessible text presents the first in-depth study of the phenomenon, assessing the degree to which celebrity culture has reshaped the fashion system. Fashion and Celebrity Culture critically examines the history of this relationship from its growth in the 19th century to its mutation during the twentieth century to the dramatic changes that have befallen it in the last two decades. It addresses the fashion-celebrity nexus as it plays itself out across mainstream cinema, television and music and in the celebrity status of a range of designers, models and artists. It explores the strategies that have enabled visual culture to recast itself in the new climate of celebrity obsession, popular culture and the art world to respond adaptively to its insistent pressures. With its engaging analysis and case studies from Lillian Gish to Louis Vuitton to Lady Gaga, Fashion and Celebrity Culture is of major interest to students of fashion, media studies, film, television studies and popular culture, and anyone with an interest in this global phenomenon.