Staging Authority: Introduction

History of celebrity branching out

“…Another exception was the collective volume on “constructing charisma” in the nineteenth century edited by Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (2010). Recent years have brought a shift in this regard, with historians of the twentieth‐ and nineteenth‐century Central Europe producing a new wave of scholarship on the topic (Giloi et al., 2022; Kohlrausch, 2019; Unangst, 2017; van Waarden & Kohlrausch, 2021). Additionally, there has been a nascent exploration of the topic in regard to the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Poland (Wesołowski, 2023; Łuksza, 2022) and Russia, with significant works dedicated, for instance, to the celebrity status attributed to Catherine the Great (Dawson, 2021).…”

“…While previously recognised as a potential but unexplored area of study, it now boasts a sizable bibliography. Scholars have examined the notion that royal authority was grounded in a form of performance (Berenson and Giloi, 2010;Roach, 2007), the influence of literary trends and market forces on the stylisation of monarchs (Pečar, 2016;Sharpe, 2009;Skerpan-Wheeler, 2011), the direct involvement of royals in celebrity culture (Garrett, 2022;Giloi et al, 2022;Wick, 2021), and the proposition that celebrity's roots have to do with early modern construction of monarchic images (Cowan, 2019;Rojek, 2019). It is increasingly recognised that the authority of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century monarchs was not solely dependent on representative projection or propaganda: their active participation with the broader culture of spectacle played a crucial role in shaping public perceptions, enhancing their legitimacy, and establishing a personal connection with their.…”

“…Another exception was the collective volume on "constructing charisma" in the nineteenth century edited by Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (2010). Recent years have brought a shift in this regard, with historians of the twentieth-and nineteenth-century Central Europe producing a new wave of scholarship on the topic (Giloi et al, 2022;Kohlrausch, 2019;Unangst, 2017;van Waarden & Kohlrausch, 2021).…”