In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity

This timely collection explores the politics of female celebrity across a range of contemporary and historical media contexts. Amidst concerns about the apparent 'decline' in the currency of modern fame ('famous for being famous'), as well as debates about the shifting parameters of public/private visibility, it is female celebrities who are positioned as the most active discursive terrain.
This collection seeks to interrogate such phenomena by forging a greater conceptual, theoretical and historical dialogue between celebrity studies and critical gender studies. It takes as its starting point the understanding that female celebrity is a particularly fraught cultural phenomenon with ideological and industrial implications that warrant careful scrutiny. In moving across case studies from the 19th century to the present day, this book works from the assumption that the case study should play a crucial role in generating debate about the dialogue between 'past' and 'present', and the individual essays seek to reflect this spirit of enquiry

Professor Diane Negra is Head of Film Studies, University College Dublin. She is Co-Series Editor (along with Yvonne Tasker) for the book series Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television, and is the author, editor or co-editor of seven books.

Dr Su Holmes is a Reader in Television Studies, University of East Anglia. She is co-editor of the book series 'TV Genres' for Edinburgh University Press, the co-editor of the new Routledge journal Celebrity Studies, and on the editorial board for Critical Studies in Television.