Celebrity Cultures in Canada

Celebrity Cultures in Canada PDF

Author: Katja Lee

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1771122242

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Celebrity Cultures in Canada is an interdisciplinary collection that explores celebrity phenomena and the ways they have operated and developed in Canada over the last two centuries. The chapters address a variety of cultural venues—politics, sports, film, and literature—and examine the political, cultural, material, and affective conditions that shaped celebrity in Canada and its uses both at home and abroad. The scope of the book enables the authors to highlight the trends that characterize Canadian celebrity—such as transnationality and bureaucracy—and explore the regional, linguistic, administrative, and indigenous cultures and institutions that distinguish fame in Canada from fame elsewhere. In historicizing and theorizing Canada’s complicated cultures of celebrity, Celebrity Cultures in Canada rejects the argument that nations are irrelevant in today’s global celebrityscapes or that Canada lacks a credible or adequate system for producing, distributing, and consuming celebrity. Nation and national identities continue to matter—to celebrities, to fans, and to institutions and industries that manage and profit from celebrity systems—and Canada, this collection argues, has a vibrant, powerful, and often complicated and controversial relationship to fame.

Fame in Hollywood North

Fame in Hollywood North PDF

Author: Samita Nandy

Publisher: Waterhill Publishing

Published: 2015-08-06

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780993993831

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The glamorous construction of Hollywood celebrities is pervasive in North America. But are glamour, splendour, allure, sex appeal, and questions of authenticity the only determining factors of Hollywood fame? How does the Canadian nation play a role in constructing fame in Hollywood? What is the nature of celebrity cultures in Canada? Samita Nandy answers these questions in the first ever history and theory of fame in Canada. Using a Canadian perspective, the book sheds new light on the relationship between fame and nation. Nandy particularly reveals the contested relations between Canada's Northern frontier and America's Wild West in discursive constructions of fame, thereby debunking the popular myth that English Canada does not have a star system. In fact, an understanding of Hollywood celebrity culture is incomplete without the understanding of fame north of the border. Fame in Hollywood North answers key questions about the nature of fame in Canada and addresses long overlooked aspects of celebrity culture in North America.

Literary Celebrity in Canada

Literary Celebrity in Canada PDF

Author: Lorraine Mary York

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0802092829

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Literary Celebrity in Canada explores that space, drawing on current theories of celebrity and questioning their tendency to view fame as an empty phenomenon.

Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?

Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? PDF

Author: Timothy Caulfield

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0807039705

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An exploration of the effect our celebrity-dominated culture has on our ideas of what it means to live "the good life" What would happen if an average Joe tried out for American Idol, underwent a professional makeover, endured Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Clean Cleanse,” and followed the outrageous rituals of the rich and famous? Health law policy researcher Timothy Caulfield finds out in this thoroughly unique, engaging, and provocative book about celebrity culture and its iron grip on today’s society. Over the past decade, our perceptions of beauty, health, success, and happiness have become increasingly framed by a popular culture steeped in celebrity influence and ever more disconnected from reality. Research tells us that our health decisions and goals are influenced by celebrity culture and endorsements, our children's ambitions are now overwhelmingly governed by the fantasy of fame, and the ideals of beauty and success are mediated through a celebrity-dominated worldview. But while much has been written about the cause of our obsession with the rich and famous, Caulfield argues that not enough has been done to debunk celebrity messages and promises about health, diet, beauty, or happiness. From super-thin models to Gwyneth Paltrow’s endorsement of a gluten free-diet for almost anyone, celebrity opinions have the power to dominate our conversations and outlooks. In this book, Caulfield provides an entertaining look into the celebrity world, including vivid accounts of his own experiences trying out for American Idol, having his skin resurfaced, and doing the cleanse; interviews with actual celebrities; thought-provoking facts, and a practical and evidence-based reality check on our own celebrity ambitions.

Indigenous Celebrity

Indigenous Celebrity PDF

Author: Jennifer Adese

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2021-04-09

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0887559212

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Indigenous Celebrity speaks to the possibilities, challenges, and consequences of popular forms of recognition, critically recasting the lens through which we understand Indigenous people’s entanglements with celebrity. It presents a wide range of essays that explore the theoretical, material, social, cultural, and political impacts of celebrity on and for Indigenous people. It questions and critiques the whitestream concept of celebrity and the very juxtaposition of “Indigenous” and “celebrity” and casts a critical lens on celebrity culture’s impact on Indigenous people. Indigenous people who willingly engage with celebrity culture, or are drawn up into it, enter into a complex terrain of social relations informed by layered dimensions of colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, and classism. Yet this reductive framing of celebrity does not account for the ways that Indigenous people’s own worldviews inform Indigenous engagement with celebrity culture––or rather, popular social and cultural forms of recognition. Indigenous Celebrity reorients conversations on Indigenous celebrity towards understanding how Indigenous people draw from nation-specific processes of respect and recognition while at the same time navigating external assumptions and expectations. This collection examines the relationship of Indigenous people to the concept of celebrity in past, present, and ongoing contexts, identifying commonalities, tensions, and possibilities.

Literary Celebrity in Canada

Literary Celebrity in Canada PDF

Author: Lorraine York

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1487513135

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In recent years, Canadian authors have enjoyed tremendous international success, writing novels that become Oscar-nominated films or achieve coveted success as selections for the Oprah Winfrey bookclub. Literary Celebrity in Canada is the first extended study of the dynamics of celebrity in the field of Canadian literature. Building on the argument that celebrity is a phenomenon firmly embraced by mainstream culture, Lorraine York examines it in relation to various tensions and conflicts within the literary community and beyond. Using as examples three contemporary literary celebrities, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields, and four earlier popular writers, Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, and L.M. Montgomery, York demonstrates that individual authors respond differently to fame in ways that can be contradictory and complex. She casts doubt on the notion of a specifically Canadian response to fame. Depending on the public interpretation of a particular writer's life and work, different tensions arise in negotiating literary celebrity. Privacy versus publicity; swift success versus laborious apprenticeship; national versus international association, or ownership of the celebrity - no single version of celebrity applies to all. Citizenship, however, is a remarkably consistent site of tension for stars, literary or otherwise. Like citizenship, celebrity marks an uneasy space wherein the single, special individual and the group demographic both meet and separate. Literary Celebrity in Canada explores that space, drawing on current theories of celebrity and questioning their tendency to view fame as an empty phenomenon. This study is an innovative attempt to understand the psychology of literary stardom and will influence future research on contemporary literature and popular culture.

Celebrity, Fame, and Infamy in the Hellenistic World

Celebrity, Fame, and Infamy in the Hellenistic World PDF

Author: Riemer A. Faber

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1487505221

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book traces the roots of modern notions of celebrity, fame, and infamy back to the Hellenistic period of classical antiquity, when sensational personages like Cleopatra of Egypt and Alexander the Great became famous world-wide.

Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture

Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture PDF

Author: Anthea Taylor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 042977298X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

Byron's Romantic Celebrity

Byron's Romantic Celebrity PDF

Author: T. Mole

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2007-07-31

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0230288383

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.