This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

TOM MOLE is Assistant Professor of English at McGill University, Canada. He is the editor of a volume of Blackwood's Magazine 1817-1825 (2006) and has published articles in Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal, the Byron Journal and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.