Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania in Britain
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A01=Ruth Scobie
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ruth Scobie
automatic-update
British identity
Captain James Cook
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBD
Category=HBTB
Category=NHTB
Celebrity Culture
commodified
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eighteenth century
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fame
imperial power
Joseph Banks
Language_English
mass print
national identity
Oceania
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
public icons
race
scandalous
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781783274086
- Weight: 488g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 May 2019
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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An intriguing case study on how popular images of Oceania, mediated through a developing culture of celebrity, contributed to the formation of British identity both domestically and as a nascent imperial power in the eighteenth century.
At the end of the eighteenth century metropolitan Britain was entranced by stories emanating from the furthest edge of its nascent empire. In the experience of eighteenth-century Britain, Oceania was both a real place, evidencedby the journals of adventurers like Joseph Banks, the voyage books of Captain James Cook and the growing collection of artefacts and curiosities in the British Museum, and a realm of fantasy reflected in theatre, fashion and the new phenomenon of mass print.
In this innovative study Ruth Scobie shows how these multiple images of Oceania were filtered to a wider British public through the gradual emergence of a new idea of fame - commodified, commercial, scandalous - which bore in some respects a striking resemblance to modern celebrity culture and which made figures such as Banks and Cook, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers on Pitcairn Island into public icons. Bringing together literary texts, works of popular culture, visual art and theatrical performance, Scobie argues that the idea of Oceania functioned variously as reflection, ideal and parody both in very local debates over the problemsof contemporary fame and in wider considerations of national identity, race and empire.
RUTH SCOBIE is a Stipendiary Lecturer at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.
