Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
A Short History of Celebrity, Hardback Book

A Short History of Celebrity Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life--and one of the least understood.

Fred Inglis sets out to correct this problem in this entertaining and enlightening social history of modern celebrity, from eighteenth-century London to today's Hollywood.

Vividly written and brimming with fascinating stories of figures whose lives mark important moments in the history of celebrity, this book explains how fame has changed over the past two-and-a-half centuries.

Starting with the first modern celebrities in mid-eighteenth-century London, including Samuel Johnson and the Prince Regent, the book traces the changing nature of celebrity and celebrities through the age of the Romantic hero, the European fin de siecle, and the Gilded Age in New York and Chicago.

In the twentieth century, the book covers the Jazz Age, the rise of political celebrities such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and the democratization of celebrity in the postwar decades, as actors, rock stars, and sports heroes became the leading celebrities. Arguing that celebrity is a mirror reflecting some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of modern history itself, Inglis considers how the lives of the rich and famous provide not only entertainment but also social cohesion and, like morality plays, examples of what--and what not--to do.

This book will interest anyone who is curious about the history that lies behind one of the great preoccupations of our lives.

Information

Save 9%

£25.00

£22.69

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information