Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and its Consequences

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The follow up to Chris Rojek's hugely successful Celebrity, this book assesses celebrity culture today. It explores how the fads, fashions and preoccupations of celebrities enter the popular lifeblood, explains what is distinctive about contemporary celebrity, and reveals the psychological, social and economic consequences of fame both upon the public and celebrities themselves. The book develops the framework for looking at celebrity culture which Rojek set out back in 2001, by showing how ascribed celebrity, achieved celebrity and celetoids overlap. The book gives a new emphasis to the role of the media and public relations in engineering fame, and the psychological consequences of celebrity - notably Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Celebrity Worship Syndrome. The book is a landmark contribution in explaining how celebrities dominate the social horizon and why we need them.

Chris Rojek is Professor of Sociology and Culture at Brunel University. His most recent publications include Pop Music, Pop Culture (Polity, 2011), The Labour of Leisure (Sage, 2010), Brit-Myth (Reaktion, 2007), and Frank Sinatra (Polity, 2004). He has also co-authored two books and edited and nine others, including a four volume collection Celebrity (Routledge, 2009).

In Fame Attack, Chris Rojek makes a powerful argument for recognising the crucial role that celebrity plays in our media culture, as well as the contribution played by the publicity industries in managing that role. Rejecting elite or taste-based dismissals of celebrity, this a brave and nuanced confrontation of the downside of contemporary celebrity as a cultural formation. * Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia *