Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen

Product Information

In 2021, he also advised on the YouTube Kids animated comedy adaptation of the successful CORPSE TALK comic book series.

We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. Inspector Coleridge belongs to an amateur dramatics society that is starting rehearsals for a performance of Macbeth, one of Coleridge's favourite plays.Greg Jenner’s engaging book packs in an astonishing number of their stories – it even, generously, finds space to include Clara the Indian rhino who, at 5,000lbs, was undoubtedly the biggest European celebrity of the 1740s. On TV, he co-hosted BBC2's INSIDE VERSAILLES discussion programme for two series, and was one of the expert panellists on BBC2’s THE GREAT HISTORY QUIZ (broadcast on Christmas Eve 2015), joining team captains Lucy Worsley and Dan Snow. And though it is right that celebrity culture was born around 1700, we don’t get quite enough of an explanation of how and why it all kicked off then. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Greg reveals why celebrity burst into life in the early eighteenth century, how it differs to ancient ideas of fame, the effect it had on public tastes, and the psychological burden stardom could place on those in the glaring limelight.

Within a few years Liszt himself had become such a star that his fans wore his image on their hands and bodies, swooned to the ground at the mere sight of him, and fought with each other to possess his abandoned cigar butts, used handkerchiefs and even the dregs of his half-slurped tea. Dead Famous is an exuberant exploration… Jenner expands these vignettes, weaving academic theory and rich analysis into his tales of stardom’s past. As in his previous, action-packed bestseller, A Million Years in a Day, Jenner here moves back and forth through the centuries at a pace, as he examines different types of celebrity, the imagery of fame, tactics of self-promotion, the fascination with celebrities’ bodies, and the joys and pitfalls of fanhood. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. He is especially good on the economics of fame, that increasingly elaborate, corrupt capitalist machine in which individual celebrities are but small whirring cogs, trying to grab their own share of the profits before their time is up.The answers can be found here in this wonderfully written book, an easy and, mostly, light hearted look at this phenomenon.

However, Jenner breathes life into all the people he talks about with such vivid enthusiasm and cracks through telling their stories with such humour and delight that he held me captivated. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). He does an anthropological social study focusing on the roots of celebrity and how circumstance met opportunity to make people become revered and celebrated. Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention.

But the famous and infamous have been thrilling and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.