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This book provides an expansive view of celebrity's intimate dimensions. In the process, it offers a timely reassessment of how notions of private and public were negotiated by writers, readers, actors and audiences in the early to mid-eighteenth century. The essays assembled here explore the lives of a wide range of figures: actors and actresses, but also politicians, churchmen, authors and rogues; some who courted celebrity openly and others who seemed to achieve it almost inadvertently. At a time when the topic of celebrity's origins is attracting unprecedented scholarly attention, this collection is an important, pioneering resource.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule.- 2. Nell Gwyn's Breasts and Colley Cibber's Shirts: Celebrity Actors and their Famous 'Parts': Elaine McGirr.- 3. Anne Oldfield's Domestic Interiors: Auctions, Material Culture and Celebrity: Claudine van Hensbergen.- 4. 'Peeping' and Public Intimacy in Susanna Centlivre's The Busy Body (1709): Victoria Joule.- 5. Garrick, Dying: James Harriman-Smith.- 6. Doctor Sacheverell and the Politics of Celebrity in Post-Revolutionary Britain: Brian Cowan.- 7. Farcical Politics: Fielding's Public Emotion: Rebecca Tierney-Hynes.- 8. 'A Man in Love': Intimacy and Political Celebrity in the Early Eighteenth Century: Emrys D. Jones.- 9. 'The ARMS of Friendship': John Dunton's Platonic Aquisitions: Nicola Parsons.- 10. 'I make a very shining figure': Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the intimate publics of authorship: Clare Brant.- 11. Foote, Fox, and the Mysterious Mrs Grieve: Print Celebrity and Imposture: Ruth Scobie.- 12. Notoriety's public interiors: Mid-Georgians Combining Celebrity and Intimacy, with an Appendix on the Rotunda at Ranelagh: George Rousseau.- 13. Body Double: Katherine Hepburn at Madame Tussauds: Laura Engel.
About the author
Emrys D. Jones is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King's College London, UK. He previously lectured at the University of Greenwich, and studied at Oxford and Cambridge universities. His first monograph,
Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. He is a co-editor of the journal
Literature and History, and also editor of
Criticks, reviews website of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His current research examines the phenomenon of the levée and other sites of formal hospitality in the eighteenth century.
Victoria Joule is an independent scholar based in Wales. She was previously a lecturer at the universities of Exeter and Plymouth for ten years. Her research is into women's writing, life-writing and the theatre of the long eighteenth-century and she has related articles published in Journals and an edited essay collection. She is currently completing a monograph on the writer Delarivier Manley and working on a larger project examining the significance of the stagecoach in eighteenth-century fiction.
Summary
This book provides an expansive view of celebrity’s intimate dimensions. In the process, it offers a timely reassessment of how notions of private and public were negotiated by writers, readers, actors and audiences in the early to mid-eighteenth century. The essays assembled here explore the lives of a wide range of figures: actors and actresses, but also politicians, churchmen, authors and rogues; some who courted celebrity openly and others who seemed to achieve it almost inadvertently. At a time when the topic of celebrity’s origins is attracting unprecedented scholarly attention, this collection is an important, pioneering resource.
