Rising Star
eBook - PDF

Rising Star

Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Rising Star

Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle

About this book

Celebrity personalities, who reign over much of our cultural landscape, owe their fame not to specific deeds but to the ability to project a distinct personal image, to create an icon of the self. Rising Star is a fascinating look at the roots of this particular form of celebrity. Here Rhonda Garelick locates a prototype of the star personality in the dandies and aesthete literary figures of the nineteenth century, including Beau Brummell, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Oscar Wilde, and explores their peculiarly charged relationship with women and performance.


When fin-de-siècle aesthetes turned their attention to the new, "feminized" spectacle of mass culture, Garelick argues, they found a disturbing female counterpart to their own highly staged personae. She examines the concept of the broadcasted self-image in literary works as well as in such unwritten cultural texts as the choreography and films of dancer Loie Fuller, the industrialized spectacles of European World Fairs, and the cultural performances taking place today in fields ranging from entertainment to the academy. Recent dandy-like figures such as the artist formerly known as Prince, Madonna, Jacques Derrida, and Jackie O. all share a legacy provided by the encounter between "high" and early mass culture. Garelick's analysis of this encounter covers a wide range of topics, from the gender complexity of the European male dandy and the mechanization of the female body to Orientalist performance, the origins of cinema, and the emergence of "crowd" theory and mass politics.

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Yes, you can access Rising Star by Rhonda K. Garelick in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Theatre History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Half-title Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents
  6. List Of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction
  9. Chapter One: The Treatises of Dandyism
  10. Chapter Two: Mallarme: Crowds, Performance, and the Fashionable Woman
  11. Chapter Three: Robotic Pleasures, Dance, and the Media Personality
  12. Chapter Four: Electric Salome: The Mechanical Dances of Loie Fuller
  13. Chapter Five: Camp Salome: Oscar Wilde's Circles of Desire
  14. Afterword
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index