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. For P. David Marshall, one of the hallmarks of celebrity is how it combines the ability of media technologies to disseminate news, images, gossip, and speculation about the public personalities of celebrity with a concomitant sense of its own impermanence, which he calls “the dual dialectic of celebrity.” The temporal point at which celebrity began to expand as an economic, social and media practice, including claims that it is more an early modern phenomenon than a modern one, is a matter of historical debate.
