ABSTRACT
Celebrity has developed as a part of modern life at the nexus of several forces: new technologies of mass culture; the emergence of readers and audiences for the products of that culture; and the appetite for public figures who embody the experiences—both ordinary and exceptional—of living in the contemporary social world. Celebrity might seem to be a synonym for fame, and the two are related but not identical. Since antiquity, the idea of fame has named the phenomenon in which men and women were widely reported upon because of their having lives of note and about whom stories and information were circulated beyond their circle of personal contact. Fame was a positive category: people were famous for their accomplishments and were figures of respect and awe. Even in instances in which we might wonder about the nature of those accomplishments, fame was attached to a sense that the famous had transformed the world and were deserving of enduring notice over a longer historical period. We might think of Cleopatra, for example, as famous for the power she yielded due to her personal allure, even though that allure might have been framed within sexist discourses where women’s sexuality was held in suspicion as somehow inappropriate. Yet her ability to achieve a measure of power, even indirectly, is what made her famous.
