Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture

SUNY Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

by Ghislaine McDayter

Argues that Byron's popularity marked the beginning of celebrity as a cultural identity.

Genres: Research

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 2009

Reviews

[Julie Bozza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this and loved it. Not that I feel I entirely understood all of it! But some intriguing stuff about the nature of democracy, which I now need to follow up - plus some wonderful stuff about fandom, which is right in my bailiwick.

Loved it.

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Another Christmas pressie from my own Mr B. ♥

[Rose Lerner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was absolutely fascinating in parts (the sections on how perceptions of Byron fandom and, by extension, modern media fandom were influenced by contemporary politics, science, and the myth of the French Revolutionary Terror as hordes of shrieking women; the section on the threat-to-high-culture of periodicals; and the first half of the chapter on fan responses to Byron were particulary awesome) and way more technical in parts than was useful for me. Freudian theory just isn't relevant to my research, unfortunately, and I would have liked less textual analysis and more historical information. But obviously that's to do with me, not the book!