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Index
Cover
Half-Title
Series
Dedication
Title
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations
Note on Spelling
Introduction
I Celebrity Ingredients
1 Celebrity-Making Coup of 1762: The Crucial Role of Story
Signs of Celebrity Emerging
Catherine’s Efforts to Control the Narrative: Her Manifestos and Their Reception
The Matrix of Celebrity and Story
New Accounts and Their Spread
2 Scandal and Engrossing Coup Backstories, until 1765
The Tsar’s Scandalous Death and the Tsarina’s Alluringly Uncertain Future
Reaching the Least Privileged Audiences with Words and Pictures
Celebrity Tropes of Marital and Sexual Squabbles
Challenges to Peter’s Masculinity
3 Media Workers and Their Commodities in Word and Image
Representing the Empress
Making Visual Images
Commodifying Further: Eighteenth-Century Celebrity Endorsements
4 Fans and Anti-Fans for a Commodity Empress
Fan Access to Celebrity Discourse
What Celebrity Offered Fans: From Entertainment and Identification to Fantasies of Social Mobility
Ambivalence and Rejection: Criticism, Anger, and Anti-Fans
“Europe’s Tsarina”
5 The Star as Contributing Subject and Living Object
Where Regal Gloire Meets Popular Celebrity
Court Rituals of Seeing and Being Seen
Impolitic but Indispensable Body and Mostly Male Watchers
Shape, Appearance, and Decorum of the Visible Body and Face
The Rude Body Visualized
Aging
II Engaging Themes, Sustaining Celebrity
6 Woman Philosopher on the Throne
Boundary Breaking Relationships
Redemptive Early Projects
Mid-Reign Cracks in Catherine’s Enlightened Image, 1773–89
Further Intellectual Engagements
7 Consuming Catherine II: Gender and Wealth
The Complex Mix of Wealth and Gender
Glamour
Extravagant Display
Art, Literature, Learning, and Patronage
8 Disconcerting Mother of Her Country: Gender and Power Again
Russia’s “Petticoat Government”
Debut in Satires, Both Textual and Visual: Poland 1772–3
“Astonisher of All Regions,” from Constantinople to Amsterdam and Antwerp
Outbreak of the Second Russo-Turkish War: More Political Cartoons
9 Empress of the Other
Russia—Exotic or Barbaric?
Pugachev Rebellion, 1773–5
Others Who Spoke for Themselves: Catherine and Her Jewish Subjects
1787: Crimea Trip and the Staged Exotic
III Transgressions Accruing and Secrets Revealed
10 Final Eight Years: Reassessment and Satirical Critique
Metaphors of Gender and Sexuality and the Dominance of An Imperial Stride!
Force Unsettling Gender: The Indeterminate-Androgynous Woman Ruler
Ridiculous Heroine
Lascivious Libertine
Indecorous and Abject Being
Monstrous-Feminine Body
11 Still Relishing the Failed Marriage, the Coup, and Its Deadly Aftermath
The Dribble and Then Flood of Curiosity-Stoking Texts
Skillful Narratives
Unhappiness, Weakness, and Discord
Sexual Difficulties
Peter III’s Mysterious Demise
12 The Lovers: Dabs of Fiction, Grains of Truth, Gobs of Scandal
Phases of Lover Publicity
Lovers Slipping into Print in Catherine’s Last Decade
Celebrity Appeal of Sexuality Reports
Love Affair Trajectories
The Gush of “Revelations” Posthumously
Completing the Record of Catherine’s Intimate Life
Venomous Poetry and Further Fiction
13 Celebrity after Death
Accounts and Images of Catherine II’s Demise for All
Further Accusations and Complex Response
Criminality
And Yet Ambivalence
Invented Libertine Death as Crime and Punishment
Becoming an Icon: Afterlife
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
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