From studies of renown (Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown) and star bodies (Richard Dyer, Stars) to celanthropy (Chris Rojek's term for celebrity philanthropy, 2013), from desecration of celebrities (Andó and Redmond 2020) to celebrity-suffering memoirs (Christopher Reeve's Still Me and the numerous Bollywood star memoirs from India), Celebrity Studies has trekked a long way. The essays collected here signpost some of the features that mark these trek and star tracks. Most of the work collected here emerges from studies of Bollywood stardom, genres of celebrity textual/cultural production and the culture and politics of celebritydom.

In this introduction, I map select frames within which the essays may be broadly located, not as protocols of reading but to demonstrate the expanse of celebrity culture of which this book and its contents are a modest instance. The frames as detailed here may appear as far too discrete but that is precisely the idea, given the contents of the essays that follow.

In their introduction to a volume on Celebrity Studies, Anthony Elliott and Ross Boyd speak of a ‘democratization of public renown’ (2018: 4) where there has been ‘a very broad change from narrow, elite definitions of public renown to more open, inclusive, understandings’ (4). They propose that contemporary celebrities ‘transform and reinvent their identities today’ and ‘many of them embrace and indeed celebrate a culture of inauthenticity’. They continue, citing Chris Rojek, ‘Parody, pastiche and, above all, sudden transformations in a star's identity are the key indicators of contemporary celebrity’ (4). While it is arguable that ‘inauthenticity’ marks the current climate and culture of the celebrity – one could say, following the Frankfurt School's exposition on modernity and popular culture, that such an inauthentic simulacra has been around long enough for the public to expect nothing less than the façade, the pastiche, the parody – the framework of a ‘democratization of public renown’ leads us into interesting ways of perceiving and studying celebrity culture.

A discussion of democratization is not necessarily, or only, about a shift in definitions of ‘public renown’ but in the very nature of celebrity identity and processes and technics of celebrification, embodying a ‘demotic turn’ as Graeme Turner termed it (2006). This discussion can begin, given the emphasis on public renown, with the very idea of the public, and its link with celebrity culture.