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.
