![]() This is deeply contestable, and indeed Jenner notes the celebrity-like qualities of earlier notables going back to Ancient Rome I’d also suggest that the print cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were sophisticated enough to develop ideas of celebrity, and the difference is one of scale not of kind. ![]() For Jenner, the role of the media and the reproducibility of mediatised versions of the celebrity means that the phenomenon has to be dated from the early eighteenth century, concurrent with the rise of the newspaper and new means of mechanical reproduction (Jenner is theory-lite, though I think he’d have gotten a kick out of Walter Benjamin). In this, he tries to get beyond ‘people we know about’ to think about the very particular framing of those we now refer to as celebrities. ![]() ![]() The most important chapter is chapter 3, where Jenner – slightly oddly a third of the way through the book – attempts to define celebrity, as opposed to ‘fame’ or ‘renown’. ![]()
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