Overview

The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the ways and means in which children can become part of celebrity culture. With the rise in popularity of reality TV, child beauty pageants, talent shows, and social media platforms, as well as more established routes to fame through TV, cinema, theatre and music, the number of children establishing a presence in public life continues to proliferate. Childhood and Celebrity brings together international scholarly writing and research about famous children, and representations of childhood, from a range of disciplines including Childhood Studies, Celebrity Studies, Cultural Studies and Film Studies in order to open up a theoretical space in which to explore and understand the complex relationship between contemporary childhood and celebrity culture. This unique collection includes detailed case studies of specific child performers such as McCaulay Culkin and Miley Cyrus, histories of child stars in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, analyses of representations of children in film and discussions of children as media creators and producers. Key themes of transgression, gender, ‘coming of age’, childhood innocence and children’s rights recur in the chapters and present a compelling argument for the emergence of the field of Childhood and Celebrity as an area of study in its own right.

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9781138855274

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Jane O’Connor is a Reader in Childhood Studies at Birmingham City University where she leads the ‘Rethinking Childhood’ research cluster. She is the author of The Cultural Significance of the Child Star (2008) and has written extensively in the areas of representations of childhood and children and the media. John Mercer is Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. His research interests include the cultural construction of masculinities, celebrity and stardom, and the sexualisation of contemporary media culture. He is the author of Rock Hudson: Star Studies (2015) and (with Martin Shingler) of Melodrama: Genre Style Sensibility. John is co-editor of the Journal of Gender Studies and an editorial board member of Celebrity Studies.

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