Gothic Celebrity

Fame and Immortality from Lord Byron to Lady Gaga
Covering literature, visual media and popular culture, this book explores how the Gothic is consistently used to disrupt the narrative of immortality that modern celebrity culture has created and how together they expose society's responses to ageing and death.

Exploring the provocative intersection of celebrity and the Gothic, this book examines representations of decaying, dead and undead celebrities in literary texts, visual media and popular culture. As far back as the Romantic period, Western culture has figured celebrities as quasi-immortal beings. Challenging popular perceptions about the triviality of celebrity culture, Harriet Fletcher puts forward both Gothic and celebrity as vehicles for understanding how modern society processes death and ageing.

With case studies ranging from Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga, Gothic Celebrity examines a diverse array of cultural works, including John Polidori’s short story ‘The Vampyre’, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Hollywood films Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints and FX’s American Horror Story. In doing so, it traces the figure of the celebrity through Gothic conventions such as vampires, portraits and ageing bodies as they manifest across literature, film, art and television. Fascinating and original, with shrewd consideration of historical context, this book stakes a claim for the pertinence of Gothic studies to cultural history and media studies.

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