Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States

by Bonnie O'Neill

Book Overview

Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O'Neill shows how celebrity culture authorizes audiences to evaluate public figures on personal terms and in so doing reallocates moral, intellectual, and affective authority and widens the public sphere. O'Neill examines how celebrity culture creates a context in which citizens regard one another as public...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 082036486X
• ISBN13: 9780820364865
• Release Date: May 2023
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"