Description
Book SynopsisThis highly original study provides a detailed analysis of Catherine the Great's celebrity
avant la lettre and how gender, power, and scandal made it commercially successful.In 1762, when Catherine II overthrew her husband to seize the throne of the Russian Empire, her instant popular fame in regions of Europe far from her own domains fit the still new discourse of modern celebrity and soon helped shape it.
Catherine the Great and Celebrity Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe shows that over the next 35 years Catherine was part of a standard troika of celebrity-making agentsintriguing central figure, large-scale media, and an engaged public. Ruth P. Dawson reveals how writers, print makers, newspaper editors, playwrights, and morethe 18th-century's media workerslaboured to produce marketable representations of the empress, and audiences of non-elite readers, viewers, and listeners savoured the resulting commodities.This book presents long neglected material evidence of t
Trade ReviewRuth P. Dawson’s meticulously researched and copiously illustrated study of Catherine the Great as a pathbreaking modern female celebrity traces the emergence of stardom and fandom during the eighteenth century. It has implications for transnational history and politics, ideas of gender and sexuality, nascent feminism, imperial self-fashioning and branding, not to mention evolving international communications and the mediated, mutual interplay of lay and aristocratic culture in the period. It’s a fascinating examination of a famous but understudied figure at the center of Enlightenment European life and the popular imagination. * Alessa Johns, Professor Emerita, University of California, Davis, USA *
Elegantly written, this is a brilliant book whose author has mastered her subject matter. Particularly fascinating is the expertise and critical care with which Ruth P. Dawson analyses the many different sources on which her narrative is based. It is not only this immense wealth of sources that is impressive. Time and again, one is also fascinated by what she can elicit from them. A genuine model of historical research! * Falko Schnicke, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Modern History and Contemporary History, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria *
Table of ContentsList of Images 1. From Fame to Celebrity in the Eighteenth Century
Part 1 - Celebrity Ingredients 2. Celebrity-Making Coup of 1762: The Crucial Role of Story 3. More Celebrity Ingredients: Scandal and Engrossing Coup Backstories 4. Media Workers and Their Commodities in Words and Images 5. Fans and Anti-fans for a Commodity Empress 6. The Star as Contributing Subject and Living Object
Part 2 - Engaging Themes, Sustaining Celebrity 7. Woman Philosopher on the Throne 8. Consuming Catherine II: Gender and Wealth 9. Disconcerting Mother of Her Country: Gender and Power Again 10. Empress of the Other
Part 3 - Transgressions Accruing and Secrets Revealed 11. Final Eight Years: Reassessment and Satirical Critique 12. Still Relishing the Failed Marriage, the Coup, and the Deadly Aftermath 13. The Lovers: Dabs of Fiction, Grains of Truth, Gobs of Scandal 14. Celebrity after Death Bibliography Index
