Full Description
Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Third Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today.
This third edition retains the previous edition's examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present while expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today's celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood and social media celebrities matter, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This new edition is thoroughly updated and expanded in its coverage of social theory, social media, and key issues around race, class, gender, and sexuality in the manufacturing of celebrity and influence.
This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.
Contents
1. The American Dream: Celebrity, Class, and Social Mobility 2. Beyond Subsistence: The Rise of the Middle Class in the Twentieth Century 3. Prosperity and Wealth Arrive: Boom Times and Women's Suffrage in the 1920s 4. Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps: Personal Failure and the Great Depression 5. We're All in This Together: Collectivism and World War II 6. Suburban Utopia: The Postwar Middle-Class Fantasy 7. Is That All There Is?: Challenging the Suburban Fantasy in the Sixties and Seventies 8. Massive Wealth as Moral Reward: The Reagan Revolution and Individualism 9. Success Just for Being You: Opportunity in the Social Media Era
