"With prismatic clarity based on authoritative scholarship, The Drama of Celebrity refracts the dazzling light of star power into its constituent colors. Scores of celebrities, past and present, share the limelight, but the exemplary Sarah Bernhardt, golden-voiced queen of the unforgettable gesture, commands center stage throughout Sharon Marcus's field-defining and compellingly readable book." --Joseph Roach, author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting and It "A landmark book for the history of popular culture. Combining a rigorous analytical intelligence with deep, meticulous research into neglected sources such as fan scrapbooks, Marcus demonstrates how the nineteenth-century theater set the mold for celebrity culture today. A brilliant, transformative account of the way that celebrity works." --Deborah Cohen, author of Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain "Utterly brilliant. Marcus travels back to the nineteenth century and returns bearing a high-definition mirror for our own celebrity-driven era. She maps the dynamics of fame, reveals their consistency through time, and teaches us how to better inhabit our mediated world today.
No fan could ask for more." --Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties "How did present-day ideas about celebrity come into being? What--and who--makes a celebrity? Excavating a cornucopia of unlikely sources, from dreams about celebrities to scrapbooks kept by ordinary fans, Sharon Marcus reveals the origins of celebrity culture to lie in dramatic negotiations between publics, media, and celebrities themselves. The resulting book is itself dramatic: a deeply researched story that manages to provide a long history of this timeliest of phenomena." --Leah Price, Harvard University " The Drama of Celebrity is a stunning work of cultural history and social theory about what creates stars on the stage, the screen, and all platforms in between. Sharon Marcus has written both a brilliant account of the different actors whose work can make or break a celebrity, and a fascinating investigation into why so many people care. The result is a memorable book that will engage readers across the academy and beyond." --Eric Klinenberg, author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life "One of the great strengths of The Drama of Celebrity is its insistence--and proof--that the forms of celebrity and fandom we consider so modern go back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is the fans who emerge as the stars of this book.
" --Eric Smoodin, University of California, Davis "I have not read such a stimulating and original book for a long time. Marcus brings the experience and thrill of nineteenth-century theater to life, but that is only the start of it. With extraordinary elegance, she manages to think about the historical and the theoretical together, and this book will swiftly establish itself as one of enduring value and importance." --Clare Pettitt, King's College London.