Sentiment & celebrity

A widely admired, if controversial, master of the sentimental appeal, poet and "magazinist" Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) was a pioneer in the modern business of celebrity.

Willis, who became the gossip-dishing darling of the middle class and whose sister was the popular writer Fanny Fern (of Ruth Hall fame), was a shrewdly self-styled man of letters who attained international fame by publicizing the renowned figures of the day, including himself, and by playing to, or playing upon, the sentimental desires of his readers.

By charting the various controversies that surrounded Willis, this book shows how the cultural and commercial impulses that fostered antebellum America's new love of fame and fashion drew sustenance from the concurrent allure of genteel cultivation and sentiment. Still, perennial tensions between desires for privacy and the invasive impulses of publicity, and between desires for sincerity and the appeal of social and commercial artifice, rendered this cultural conjunction highly unstable.

Because this cultural instability and the impulses that spawned it cut across a number of discourses, and because, in many ways, this double-edged quality remains central to our modern celebrity culture, Sentiment and Celebrity will appeal to students and scholars of several disciplines, among them literary studies, women's studies, sociocultural history, and communication studies.