The Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema series is now
available as a eleven volume set: Movie Stars from the 1910s to the
2010s.
Each volume presents original essays analyzing the movie star against
the background of American cultural history. As icon, as mediated
personality, and as object of audience fascination and desire, the
Hollywood star remains the model for celebrity in modern culture and
represents a paradoxical combination of achievement, talent, ability,
luck, authenticity, superficiality, and even ordinariness. In all of the
volumes, stardom is studied as an effect of, and influence on, the
particular historical and industrial contexts that enable a star to be
"discovered," to be featured in films, to be promoted and publicized,
and ultimately to become a recognizable and admired--even
notorious--feature of the cultural landscape. Understanding when, how,
and why a star "makes it," dazzling for a brief moment or enduring
across decades, allows readers to assess the importance of mediated
celebrity in an increasingly visualized world.