The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The famous and the infamous: Waxworks as retailers of renown
Abstract
A B S T R A C T • The relationship between Madame Tussaud's waxworks and the phenomenon of renown is close but remains hitherto unexamined. Studying the historic changes in this and previous waxwork exhibitions, however, reveals shifts in the underlying concepts of renown since the late 1600s. The most prominent shifts are from the baroque 'hero' to the grand homme of the Enlightenment, and from the 'great man' to the 'celebrity' in the nineteenth century. Madame Tussaud can be attributed with popularizing the Enlightenment idea of the 'great man' in Britain and with including in her exhibition the first media celebrities, whose renown she reinforced. •
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“Granger's system classifies society by way of a range of categories of 'wellknownness', or 'renown' (Kornmeier, 2008, p. 278).”
From A previously unexplored encounter: the English judiciary, carte de visite and photography as a form of mass media (2018) · cites this paper as Kornmeier, 2008
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 28
- Adhémar, J., 1978, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 92, 203
- Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer (1972) 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' , pp. 123-71 in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum.
- Altick, R.D., 1978, The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1600-1862
- Anon., 1648, Verklaringe van verscheyden kunst-rijcke wercken, en harr beweginghe, door oorlogie-werck ghedreven... Noch eenige aerdige Beelden, levens-groote, van vermaerde Koninghen en Princen deser Eeuw…
- Anon., 1818, Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the whole-length Composition Figures and other Works of Art, forming the unrivalled Exhibition of Madame Tussaud…
- Anon., 1819, Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the whole-length Composition Figures and other Works of Art, forming the unrivalled Exhibition of Madame Tussaud
- Baumgärtel, B., 1995, Die Galerie der Starken Frauen. Die Heldin in der französischen und italienischen Kunst des 17. Jahrhunderts
- Boorstin, D.J. (2006 [1961]) 'From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-event', pp. 72-90 in P.D. Marshall (ed.) The Celebrity Culture Reader. London, New York: Routledge.
- Braudy, L., 1986, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History
- Diderot, D., 1751, 'héroisme' and 'héros', vol. 8; 'grand, grandeur', vol. 7; 'grand homme', suppl. vol. 3, in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et des métiers, 35 vols
- Edwards, O.D., 1993, Burke and Hare
- Eisma, M., 1996, David en Goliath met zijn schilddrager: een beeldengroep uit het Oude Doolhof
- 10.1007/978-1-137-09650-0 · DOI
- Habermas, J., 1989, [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
- Hamilton, A., 1998, The Times, 11
- Hansmann, M., 1993, Andrea del Castagnos Zyklus der 'Uomini famosi' und 'Donne famose': Geschichtsverständnis und Tugendideal im florentinischen Frühhumanismus
- Kornmeier, U. (2004) 'Madame Tussaud's as a Popular Pantheon', pp. 210-34 in M. Craske and R. Wrigley (eds) Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea. Aldershot: Ashgate.
- Kornmeier, U., 2006, Taken from Life: Madame Tussaud und die Geschichte des Wachsfigurenkabinetts vom 17. bis frühen 20. Jahrhunderts
- MacGregor, G., 1884, The History of Burke and Hare and of the Ressurrectionist Times
- Marshall, P.D., 1997, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture
- Marshall, P.D., 2006, The Celebrity Culture Reader
- 10.1163/187501783X00415 · DOI
- Pyke, E.J., 1973, A Biographical Dictionary of Wax Modellers
- Richardson, R., 2001, Death, Dissection and the Destitute
- Rojek, C., 2001, Celebrity
- Schickel, R., 1985, Common Fame: The Culture of Celebrity
- Sennett, R., 1976, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism
- Wanko, C., 2003, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-century Britain
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Moran, L. J. (2018) · International Journal of Law in Context · doi:10.1017/s174455231800023x · Cited by 1
Metadata
- Authors
- Kornmeier, U.
- Affiliations
- Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (Centre for Literary and Cultural Research) Berlin, Germany,
- Venue
- International Journal of Cultural Studies
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2008-09
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 276-288
- ISSN
- 1367-8779
- 1460-356X
- Cited by
- 4
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The famous and the infamous: Waxworks as retailers of renown. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/1367877908092585
- The paper
- Kornmeier, U. (2008). The famous and the infamous: Waxworks as retailers of renown. International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877908092585
