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Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable. Drawing on scrapbooks, personal diaries, and vintage fan mail, Marcus traces celebrity culture back to its nineteenth-century roots, when people the world over found themselves captivated by celebrity chefs, bad-boy poets, and actors such as the "divine" Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), as famous in her day as the Beatles in theirs. Known in her youth for sleeping in a coffin, hailed in maturity as a woman of genius, Bernhardt became a global superstar thanks to savvy engagement with her era's most innovative media and technologies: the popular press, commercial photography, and speedy new forms of travel. Whether you love celebrity culture or hate it, The Drama of Celebrity will change how you think about one of the most important phenomena of modern times.

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.--From publisher description

Undead texts are works that help to found fields only to find themselves eventually rejected by specialists and embraced by novices. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is an exemplary Undead text: hailed as a classic when it was first published in 1949, dismissed by many scholars of gender and sexuality studies by the 1980s, yet still in print and still inspiring to undergraduates today. This article explores the work's other Undead characteristics, including its combination of erudition and generalism, its memorable turns of phrase, and its invention of the very criteria by which it would later be found wanting (e.g., anti-essentialism). The article then turns to the original reception of the first English-language translation (published in 1953) to understand why the text initially had such a strong impact, and ends by speculating about why it continues to inspire today's undergraduates.

Historian Judith R. Walkowitz, interviewed by Sharon Marcus, talks about how she came to study Victorian prostitution and the evolution of London's Soho neighborhood, her efforts to connect political engagement and scholarship, how the discipline of history has and hasn't changed over the past forty years, the alterity of the past, and her current project on the history of feminism and urban space in 1970s and 1980s London.

Oscar Wilde's Salome, composed in French in 1891, represents both an episode in the history of celebrity and a dramatization of celebrity's theatrical structure. The play first entered the orbit of stardom when Sarah Bernhardt, internationally hailed as the world's greatest actress, agreed to play the title role in 1892; its author had long been a celebrity, known as much for his artfully crafted persona as for his published writings. Bernhardt, Wilde, and Salome, a play in which almost every character is both fan and idol, were all defined by the volatile conjunctions shared by theatricality and celebrity: the asymmetrical interdependence of actors and audiences, stars and acolytes, exhibition and attention, distance and proximity, absolutism and democracy, exemplarity and impudence, worship and desecration, and presence and representation.

The article investigates the practice of female marriages in 19th century Great Britain and United States and argues that female marriages provided model for more progressive forms of the legal marriage between men and women. Unlike homosexuality in the 20th century, the same-sex relationships between women in the 19th century often enjoyed social recognition and some women in female marriages occupied prominent social positions. Because they were considered to rest on contract, female marriages served as inspiration for the contractual view of marriage advocated by many supporters of the Victorian marriage reform. The contribution of women in female couples to the success of the marriage reform was further underlined by their belonging to influential social networks. The author also argues that while the structuralist anthropology of mid-20th century, represented through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, had limited understanding of homosexuality as a socially legitimate phenomenon, the Victorian anthropology of the second half of the 19th century was relatively more open regarding the same-sex relationships. It is contended that authors as diverse as Henry Maine, Johann Bachofen, or Frederick Engels provided impulses in their work both for a positive evaluation of the same-sex relationships and for a more egalitarian understanding of marriage.

La classe moyenne britannique considérait l'amitié entre femmes comme un élément crucial de la féminité traditionnelle, et cependant l'amitié est bizarrement absente des études récentes consacrées à l'idéal de la «femme au foyer» et à l'histoire de la famille. Cette lacune est d'autant plus frappante au vu de l'attention portée aux amitiés féminines dans les manuels de savoir-vivre et dans les «récits de vie», un terme qui comprend les journaux intimes, les lettres, les autobiographies et les biographies. Cet essai utilise ces documents afin de distinguer entre les amitiés non-sexuelles et d'autres types de relations que les théoriciennes lesbiennes et féministes du XXe siècle ont souvent confondus à tort avec l'amitié. Après avoir fourni les bases qui permettent de distinguer l'amitié de 1) l'amour sans retour, 2) l'infatuation, et 3) des partenariats sexuels à long terme entre femmes,modelés sur le mariage, cet article analyse le répertoire et la signification de l'amitié en tant que telle.L'amitié jouait un double rôle dans la vie des femmes de l'époque victorienne: elle renforçait les qualités idéales attribuées aux femmes,telles que l'altruisme et la fidélité,mais elle permettait aussi aux femmes de s'engager dans des types de compétitions,d'initiatives,de plaisirs sensuels qui était normativement assignés aux hommes.Cette double qualité constitue le «jeu du système», l'élasticité qui résulte du fait qu'une relation sociale permet aux acteurs de modifier les règles sans les changer de manière essentielle.

sharon marcus teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author ofApartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999) and of articles on feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. She is currently completing a book on female homoeroticism and the Victorian family.