edited by Nora Nachumi and Kristina Straub
contributions by Elaine McGirr, Sarah Ailwood, Anne Betty Weinshenker, Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Miriam L. Wallace, Teri Doerksen, Kirsten Teresa Saxton, Jane Wessel, Stuart Sherman, Semane Parsons, Heather McPherson, Sören Hammerschmidt, Kevin Bourque, Glynis Ridley and Jack Lynch
University of Delaware Press, 2022
eISBN: 978-1-64453-267-6 | Paper: 978-1-64453-264-5 | Cloth: 978-1-64453-265-2
Library of Congress Classification PR756.B56M35 2022
Dewey Decimal Classification 820.9492

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.