2005-06-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe,Biographical Plays About Famous Artists,Hardback,9781904303473,29.99,"Since the late 1970s, more than 200 biographical plays about famous artists (composers, fine artists, poets, actors etc.) were written and staged in the United Kingdom. The book analyses the range of these plays, arguing that the dramatists often place the main artist character(s) in an adverse situation, inward (e.g., mental illness) or outward (a personal enemy, or an anonymous power, such as war). Against the background of such adverse forces, the artist characters tend come across as flawed human beings. At the same time, most plays take care to provide good insights into the artists’ genius and their artistic integrity in the face of the adversity. The book also addresses the question why there have been so many biographical plays about famous artists over the past twenty-five years, providing answers in the context of theatre history and developments across academic disciplines and society as a whole. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2005-06-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe,Boulevard Comedy Theatre in Germany,Hardback,9781904303480,29.99,"Twenty major German cities have a total of twenty-four theatres specializing, at a high level of sophistication, in presenting light comedy. They have their own typical ambience, principles of artistic management and casting. There are playwrights, actors, directors and designers who work almost exclusively in the genre, called boulevard comedy, developing highly specialised approaches to their work. In almost all cases, the predominantly privately run boulevard comedy theatres in Germany have been able to attract larger audiences than municipal or state theatres in the same cities. The book provides a description and an analysis of this phenomenon, which is unique to Germany. Chapters focus on an analysis of ambience, artistic managers, artistic policies and artistic structures, on major characteristics of the plays presented on the stages of German boulevard comedy theatres, on aspects of translation and the cultural transfer of comedy and laughter and on aspects of production and reception, dealing in turn with actors, directors, media coverage and audiences. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2005-12-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe,"The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts",Hardback,9781904303596,29.99,"In recent years, philosophical debate of the concept of beauty has seen a remarkable renaissance. The twelve essays presented in this book provide a broad basis for a thorough reassessment of the European traditions of beauty in the arts (fine arts, performing arts, media arts) and in literature and film, not as a return to some distant, and allegedly ideal past, but as a constructive means of realising the potential of the arts for the 21st century. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-01-01,Dimple Godiwala,Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres,Hardback,9781904303664,39.99,"Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres is the first comprehensive collection of critical essays on the subject. Edited by Dimple Godiwala, the anthology is in six parts: A lengthy Introduction is followed by Part II (Histories and Trajectories) which contains chapters which survey the work of the Black Theatre Forum and the histories of Black and Asian theatres in Britain. Part III (Histories of Theatre Companies and Arts Venues) charts brief histories of the major theatre companies, Talawa, Tara and Tamasha and contains a survey of Birmingham’s changing arts venues. Part IV called simply Controversies is a document of the Sikh diaspora’s uproar over Behzti and issues of censorship. Part V (The Dramatists) critically explores the work of several dramatists such as Killion M. Gideon, Liselle Kayla, Roselia John Baptiste, Trish Cooke, Zindika, Jackie Kay, Valerie Mason-John, Wole Soyinka, Sol B. River, Roy Williams, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Anu Kumar, Rukhsana Ahmad, Bettina Gracias, Bapsi Sidhwa, Tanika Gupta, Deepak Verma, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and Yasmin Whittaker Khan. Part V (Theatre Voices) consists of autobiographical essays by some of Britain’s theatremakers. This contains contributions by Jatinder Verma, Yvonne Brewster, Sol B. River, Valerie Mason-John, Bapsi Sidhwa. A long overdue book which examines in imaginative depth the ‘universe inside’ an often trivialised area of British theatre. Alternatives Within The Mainstream provides serious academic opinion and detailed textual analysis in abundance. The book’s impressive collection of facts and analyses challenge the culture of myth which too often obscures the relevance of Black and Asian work. There are also many absorbing revelations: did you know, for instance, that Ignatius Sancho was Garrick’s friend? Yvonne Brewster ","""One of the best features of Dimple Godiwala's anthology...is that it can serve as a sourcebook for those interested in black and Asian theatre in Britain. The collection ranges from descriptive and informative articles to analyses of the radically inflected reception of plays and playwrights in contemporary Britain. Godiwala's anthology attempts to balance histories of theatre companies with critical accounts of specific productions or the oeuvre of a playwright."" -Kanika Batra in Wasafiri # 54, Summer 2008 ""Godiwala's collection is commendable for its wide ranging overview and analysis of Black and Asian Theatres."" -Giovanni Buonanno, 'Interactions' Vol 17.2, Ege University ""Yvonne Brewster (the celebrated founder of Talawa Theatre) comments on the back jacket of this new edited collection that it is 'long overdue'. The editor must be congratulated on having succeeded so well in extensively documenting a crucial, but neglected, topic in contemporary British theatre. It is not only academics adn theatre practitioners who will find this landmark collection of over 400 pages on British Black and Asian theatre and drama an extremely welcome arrival on the scene. My own students, especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds, have been waiting for a groundbreaking volume like this for a very long time... For those interested in such things, this book is well produced from the dust jacket's inclusion of details from Talawa's legendary production of C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins, to the legibility and clean feel of the typeface... Nonetheless, this is an important and timely collection that deserves to be read widely."" -Steven Barfield, vol. 60, number 2, 2006, Theatre Notebook, A Journal of teh History and Technique of the British Theatre (The Society for Theatre Research) ""One of the best features of Dimple Godiwala's anthology, Alternatives Within the Mainstream, is that it can servce as a sourcebook for those interested in black and Asian threatre in Britain... For those already familiarwith the terrain of black British drama this anthology is a valuable addition to the analytical field; those embarking on a study of it will also find it a good resource."" Kanika Batra, Wasafiri Journal # 54, Summer 2008 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgraefe,"Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts",Hardback,9781904303633,44.99,"In May 2005, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth hosted the First International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature, and the Arts, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the launch of the refereed web journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts (CLA) (www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/journal), the launch of Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe’s Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential and the launch of Amy Ione’s Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths. 80 delegates from fourteen countries attended the conference. This book collects 40 of the papers presented, characteristic of the wide range of topics and disciplines represented at the conference. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-01-01,William S. Haney II,Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions,Hardback,9781904303657,29.99,"Different symbolic traditions have different ways of describing the shift of awareness toward sacred events. While not conforming to familiar states of phenomenality, this shift of awareness corresponds to Turner's liminal phase, Artaud's metaphysical embodiment, Grotowski's “translumination,” Brook's “holy theater,” and Barba's “transcendent” theater—all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste of a void of conceptions. This book argues that, by allowing to come what Derrida calls the unsayable, the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Henry Hwang, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott and Girish Karnad induces characters and spectators to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception, attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste the void of conceptions. As the nine plays discussed in this book suggest, the internal observer lies behind all cultural constructs as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its generative condition of unknowingness. The unsayable (and the language used to convey it) that Derrida finds in literature has clear affinities with the Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta. Derridean deconstruction contains as a subtext the structure of consciousness that it both veils with the undecidable trappings of the mind and allows to come as an unsayable secret through a play of difference. Although Derrida views theater and the text as mutually deconstructing and claims that presence or unity “has always already begun to represent itself,” the six playwrights discussed here show that cultural performance indeed points through its universally ambiguous and symbolic types toward a trans-verbal, trans-cultural wholeness. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-04-01,Dragon Zoltan,The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó,Hardback,9781904303756,29.99,"The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó analyses some of the films made by Academy Award winner Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó to establish an interpretative matrix disclosing the root of haunting effects in the visual and the narrative levels of the diegeses. By combining two distinct—and often incongruous—lines of psychoanalytic thought (by Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Lacan), Zoltán Dragon argues that these films are fuelled by the work of a phantom on all levels, hiding the secrets of the family history of the characters and producing uncanny visual scenarios to make the act of hiding even more effective. The book brings the reader into the realm of the “phantom text” generating the film texts and crypt screens of the oeuvre, and investigates the causes of undiscussible and painful secrets that propel some pivotal characters to reappear in subsequent films, apparently driven by a compulsion to continue their narration, failing to finish their stories—even when they appear to be successful. The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó introduces a visual reinterpretation of Abraham’s phantom theory that opens up possibilities for an alternative way of studying film. I first saw this work in the form of a full and detailed draft. I was impressed by the boldness of the ideas, the attempt to integrate and work with different theoretical positions and the quite extraordinary reading of the films of István Szabó. There was clearly a powerful and creative and original intelligence at work. A further draft accomplished one important thing that had been missing from the first one – the direct analysis of the visual material and its contribution to the overall narrative and theoretical framework. The work employs a psychoanalytic framework with some key concepts such as ‘the phantom’ drawn from the work of Torok and Abraham. This theory is fairly well known but it has not, to my knowledge, been used in any extensive way in the analysis of film texts before. Zoltan also makes reference to Freud and uses some Lacanian ideas in his analysis at the level of the visual. These multiple theoretical references are not inconsistent; they are finely judged and are most productive. Theory is never used as a grid to be imposed on the material. There is a fine balance between theory and textual analysis that is hard to achieve, but it is successful here. I think that the position that Zoltan Dragon has forged for himself and from which he writes, is a highly original and interesting one. He has been most successful in developing his framework in relation to Szabó’s oeuvre which he knows in the greatest detail. His readings of that oeuvre are rich and powerful and will provoke considerable debate in the world of film studies and also of psychoanalytical studies. Parveen Adams, Core Teaching Faculty, London Consortium ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-06-01,"Belkıs Uluoğlu, Ayhan Enşici, Ali Vatansever",Design and Cinema: Form Follows Film,Hardback,9781847180032,39.99,"Why has cinema become so closely acquainted with the design disciplines, and vice versa? What valuable or significant experience can come out from this brotherhood, both in terms of substantial and in terms of representative means? What seems to be more promising in terms of theory making both in design and in cinema is the substantial dimension of their relationship, since it points to an essential change in our conception of existence and space: The timelessness of optic space replaced by the time-bounded experientiality of haptic space. This also brings about different theoretical elements for analysis by leaving the subject and the object aside and looking into what their relations have produced, the outcome being patterns of experience which exist somewhere between the lived and the made, i.e. being abstract and concrete at the same time. And, finally, this is where cinema becomes a poetic medium and an important tool for representing the so-called patterns. Design and Cinema: Form Follows Film is interested in seeing those patterns in terms of formal categories, thought to be representation of certain experiences. The book is organized in two parts, Discourse on Form and Film and Works on Form and Film. The first part of the book – discourse – is intended to give a picture of current thought on the formal categories, introduced here as, existential, narrative, structural, constructive, temporal, digital, social, and fragmental. The second part of the book presents works, conducted either in the form of workshops or films, as expressive media of the formal categories discussed in the first part. The volume presents works of Juhani Pallasmaa, Gül Kale, Ayşe N.Erek, Ayşe E.C. Orlandi, Andong Lu, François Penz, Marshall Deutelbaum, Ferenc Boné, Dilek Altuntaş, Halit Refiğ, Arthur Lizie, Tuğyan A.Dural, Fatoş Adiloğlu, Seçkin Kutucu, Lutz Robbers, Türker Armaner, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Alex McDowell, Gül K.Erk, Joaquim Moreno, Aydın H. Polatkan, Helmut Weihsmann, Ayşe Şentürer, Julie Talen, Olga Vásques-Ruano, Otto von Busch, Henric Benesch, Belkıs Uluoğlu and Işıl B.Serim. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-06-01,William Hope,"Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema",Hardback,9781847180025,29.99,"The nature of the spectator’s emotional and intellectual engagement with films has attracted increasing critical scrutiny over the past decade, and theoretical frameworks have been elaborated to analyse how and why viewers are moved by what they see on screen. Viewer responses are influenced by factors including genre expectations, involuntary physiological reactions to what is seen and heard, shifting attachments towards screen characters, and by specific devices within a film’s mise-en-scène, such as lighting and colour. Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion; Cognition; Cinema is a film-by-film analysis of the work of the Oscar-winning director, a study that examines the nature of the strong affective charge that characterizes his films, and which also explores the cognitive and intellectual appeal of Tornatore’s cinema. The volume illustrates the ways in which an affective and intellectual synergy can develop between a film’s aesthetics and its conceptual agenda, as instantiated by films such as the celebrated Cinema Paradiso. The affective power that characterizes Tornatore’s work has long been acknowledged by critics, and while analysing the configurations of visual, aural, and narrative devices that generate such intensely poignant viewing experiences, the volume also elucidates the ways in which the director’s stylistic approach intensifies the significance of a range of social and cultural questions affecting Western society, issues that lie at the heart of his films. Reviews of the Book: ""Giuseppe Tornatore is one of the few authentically original voices to emerge in the cinematic world over the past quarter century. He champions community values, solidly grounded in emotional engagement and interaction, over the brash, loud, self-proclaiming egocentricity that has increasingly dominated western societies since the nineteen-eighties and, paradoxically, isolated the individual ever more intensely within his own subjective world. Yet, viewed superficially, his narratives appear old-fashioned, flirting frequently and precariously with overt melodrama and sentimentalism while managing nevertheless to mount a powerful critique of what our societies have become and what they have sacrificed that makes them the poorer. Eschewing the alienating, ironical deconstructionism of most of his contemporaries, Tornatore subtly employs every technical device at his disposal to enforce the spectator’s identification with the wistfulness of his protagonists, in their growing awareness of a sense of personal loss and nostalgia. Yet, this fulfils only part of his intention, for having snared us in a tangle of emotions, he then, in Pirandellian fashion, propels us towards the moment of intellectually-charged reflection, in which the film’s apparently negative terminus ad quem is transformed into the forceful negation of those contemporary values that have brought about the protagonist’s sense of moral and affective dislocation. William Hope’s authoritative study carefully charts these processes as they unfold within individual films and across successive films, not neglecting, when appropriate, to comment on Tornatore’s continual refinements and extensions of his conceptual framework and applications of his visual techniques. However, this book goes well beyond illustration of a thesis for it is also concerned with how we watch films and react to them and how, through carefully judged juxtapositions of his material, use of cameras, variations in intensity of music or silences, and so on, Tornatore is able to make use of this essentially psychological knowledge to manoeuvre his spectators towards a realisation of his own cinematic, which is to say, moral vision of the contemporary world."" Professor Doug Thompson, University of Hull ""William Hope's work gives to the cinema of Tornatore the degree of analytical thoroughness that it merits, (but which, until now, has not been afforded to this important contemporary director). The book offers a clear overview of Tornatore's films, and of the social and cultural context within which they are produced. Hope assesses the relevance of contemporary critical theory to the reception of Tornatore's work and especially to Cinema Paradiso. In so doing, he makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Tornatore as a film-maker."" Pauline Small, Queen Mary College, University of London ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-07-01,Donald E. Morse,Anatomy of Science Fiction,Hardback,9781847180186,29.99,"""This wide-ranging collection of essays re-opens the connection between science fiction and the increasingly science-fictional world. Kevin Alexander Boon reminds us of the degree to which the epistemology of science fiction infects modern political discourse. Károly Pintér explores the narrative structures of utopian estrangement, and Tamás Bényei and Brian Attebery take us deeper into the cultural exchanges between science fiction and the literary and political worlds. In the second half, Donald Morse, Nicholas Ruddick and Éva Federmayer look at the way in which science fiction has tackled major ethical issues, while Amy Novak and Kálmán Matolcsy consider memory and evolution as cultural batteries. The book ends with important discussions of East German and Hungarian science fiction by Usch Kiausch and Donald Morse respectively. I envisage that the book will find a market both among academics and as a recommended text to undergraduates as it offers interesting essays on important readers. The tendency for science fiction to be offered as a literature class to science majors is not usually considered, but this book would be particularly appropriate for such a market."" Dr. Farah Mendelsohn, Middlesex University ","Collectively speaking, the authors featured in this anthology do a fine job of peeling the skin off the body of storytelling we call sf to examine specific texts and traditions under the bright light of crtitcal and cultural theory. All of the essays in this volume are outstanding examples of sf scholarship that use theory to illuminate sf while also using sf to complicate readers' understanding of theory. In my experience, that is something that happens too seldom in sf studies, and that alone makes Anatomy of Science Fiction worth reading. Lisa Yaszek in Science Fiction Studies Along with its international flavor, the strength of this collection comes from its breadth, yet it is also bound by the focus on the cultural and critical context in which each of the contributors sites and cites his or her analyses. Anatomy of Science Fiction is a thought-provoking and welcome addition to science fiction scholarship. W. A. SENIOR; JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS Vol. 19.2 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-07-01,Barbara Gabriella Renzi and Stephen Rainey,From Plato’s Cave to the Multiplex: Contemporary Philosophy and Film,Hardback,9781847180131,34.99,"This is a rich and varied collection of articles that both offer philosophical analyses of film and reflect on philosophical questions through film. The pieces range widely, from discussions of specific films and the work of particular directors, to reflections on cinematic techniques and on the medium of cinema in general. Here, cinema enters into a genuinely productive interaction with philosophy. We see how philosophical perspectives and methods are able to inform the critical analysis of film, how films can concretely explore and make use of philosophical perspectives, and how film can challenge and provoke philosophical reflection. Some of the articles address familiar themes in the developing philosophy and film literature in fresh ways, while others make surprising and revealing new connections between philosophical perspectives and cinema. Either way, the results are always interesting and illuminating, and demonstrate once again how fruitful the bringing together of philosophy and film can be. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-07-01,Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Thorkell Á. Óttarsson,Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky,Hardback,9781904303114,39.99,"The authors of this book are from various countries and have diverse educational backgrounds but they are united by one common thing; their love of Andrei Tarkovsky's films. Tarkovsky is one of the greatest film directors of all time and the most famous Soviet film maker since Eisenstein. He died of lung cancer in Paris 28th December 1986, only 54 years of age. This year, 2006, therefore marks the 20th anniversary of his passing. This is most likely the broadest volume on Tarkovsky, spanning everything from classical film theories to theological analyses, via sociology and the history of the ANS synthesizer. It is divided into two parts. The first part is called Film theories and, as the name suggests, contains papers that touch more or less on film theories. Benjamin Halligan and Terence McSweeney write about Tarkovsky's aesthetic strategies and film theory. Sean Martin writes about the autobiography in Tarkovsky's films, David Beer about the music in Solaris, Oddný Sen analyzes dream-symbolism in the films with an emphasis on Ivan's Childhood and Paul Johnson looks at Tarkovsky's films from a sociological perspective. The second part of the book concentrates on theological themes in Tarkovsky's films. This kind of approach has been seriously neglected by most books and papers written about his films until now. Two of the papers in this part are general in nature. Torsten Kälvemark writes about the philosophical and theological understanding of Andrei Tarkovsky's work and Astrid Söderbergh Widding analyzes what's between the visible and invisible in the films of Tarkovsky. The remaining five papers concentrate on specific films, namely, Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, Nostalgia and The Sacrifice. Tarkovsky frequently invited the audience to interpret his films as they saw fit. The authors of the papers in this book have all accepted Tarkovsky's invitation. The academic discussion of film and religion has recently entered a new and increasingly vital phase. One of the epicenters of this international discussion is the Icelandic group Deus ex Cinema. This is their first publication accessible to non-Icelandic readers ... and it delivers everything that is promised. It takes you all the way from Tarkovsky's childhood through Gilles Deleuze and Pavel Florensky to God – and back again. Through the Mirror is an inspiring collection of critical essays... Ola Sigurdson, Associate Professor in Systematic Theology Göteborg University, Sweden As the editors rightly state, little analysis has been leveled at the rich religious motifs and quotations within Tarkovsky's films... This compilation is therefore welcome for its focus as well as its approach; avoiding the extremes of pat reductionism or whimsical analysis, the various authors here strike a compelling pose between cinematic and theological scholarship and a respect for ambiguity and multiple interpretations. The writing is serious yet accessible... Doug Cummings, Nostalghia.com ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-09-01,Kylo-Patrick R. Hart,Film and Sexual Politics,Hardback,9781847180377,39.99,"Film and Sexual Politics: A Critical Reader features a variety of noteworthy critical essays that explore the evolution, representation, and social construction of sex, gender, and sexual orientation from the early days of cinema to the early twenty-first century. This collection investigates the complex relations between film form/style and sexual politics (past and present), as well as the ideological and social ramifications of those relations for the lived realities of individuals in the United States over the course of the twentieth century and beyond. Contrary to popular perceptions of films as relatively simplistic forms of “entertainment,” the essays in this collection demonstrate clearly how the act of producing meaning through the use of cinematic verbal and visual signs is far from a simple process with negligible historical consequences. This book offers insightful and satisfying reading to established and emerging scholars who explore film history, theory, and criticism, as well as to all readers with a general interest in film history and the effects of cinema on individuals and popular culture. The range of films analyzed includes Being John Malkovich, Citizen Kane, Elizabeth, Female Perversions, From Here to Eternity, Gidget, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Jackass the Movie, The Matrix, Maurice, My Own Private Idaho, Porcile, The Road to Ruin, and Wilde. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006-09-01,Rebecca Housel,From Camera Lens To Critical Lens: A Collection Of Best Essays On Film Adaptation,Hardback,9781847180315,34.99,"From Camera Lens to Critical Lens: A Collection of Best Essays on Film Adaptation, edited by Rebecca Housel, takes the reader through films by directors like Alfred Hitchcock to examining the relevance of twenty-first century British politics with current film; from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman to author Virginia Woolf; and, examining new theoretical approaches to international film adaptations from China, Japan, Britain, Canada, and France, as well as films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Daughters of the Dust. The collection is derived from the Popular Culture Association (PCA) film-adaptation-area conference papers, researched and written by fourteen diverse scholars from all over the world, who gathered together in San Diego, California in April 2005 to further their research by presenting their ideas on film adaptation, now in full text versions within this exciting new volume. Accessible, engaging and informative, any audience may read and enjoy this edited collection on film adaptation. The volume would also work well for pedagogical purposes, both in and out of the classroom. Such a volume may easily be used in courses for English, film studies, gender studies, women’s studies, fine art, psychology, political science, history, and more. A work of diverse international voices, this collection represents the very best on film adaptation today. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-02-01,R. Victoria Arana,“Black” British Aesthetics Today,Hardback,9781847181169,39.99,"“Black” British Aesthetics Today is a collection of twenty-four exciting critical and theoretical essays exploring current thinking about the hottest artistic, literary, and critical works now being produced by “black” Britons. This book features a number of chapters by the avant-garde “black” British novelists, poets, and artists themselves. It includes, for instance, aesthetic manifestos by Diran Adebayo, Anthony Joseph, Roshini Kempadoo, Sheree Mack, Valerie Mason-John, and SuAndi as well as key essays by globally renowned critics, including Amna Malik, Kobena Mercer, Lauri Ramey, Roy Sommer, and many others. As a compendium, this book represents a powerfully fresh intellectual current of thought. It provides readers with important insights into contemporary “black” aesthetics, and it includes an array of important clarifications initially voiced at the groundbreaking international symposium that took place on April 8, 2006, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., by outstanding new scholars in this burgeoning field of study: e.g., Kevin Etienne-Cummings, Valerie Kaneko Lucas, Michael McMillan, Magdalena Maczynska, Courtney Martin, Jude Okpala, Deirdre Osborne, Koye Oyedeji, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Sandra Ponzanesi, Andrene M. Taylor, Samera Owusu Tutu, and Tracey Walters. The authors contextualise contemporary “black” British aesthetics in relation to the African, African American, and Postcolonial aesthetic traditions; they explore an exciting array of critical theories, trends of feeling, and lively aesthetic movements thriving today in “black” Britain; and they examine and assess embodied aesthetics at play in a wide range of specific works by today’s most brilliant “black” British novelists, poets, photographers, live performance artists, dramatists, architects, musicians, graphic artists, and cinematographers. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-03-01,Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon,"Zoom In, Zoom Out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema",Hardback,9781847181350,34.99,"In the context of the transformations that Europe is undergoing, Zoom in, Zoom out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema attempts to serve as a testimony to the multiple ways in which European filmmakers are questioning the many borders of the continent. European films have become a vital cultural space where the relationship between borders and identity is being renegotiated. The films discussed here self-consciously address the question of European identity while overtly crossing geographic, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic borders. While all the articles explore the crossing of borders in Contemporary European films, the volume maintains diverse themes and perspectives as subtopics. It includes articles not only about films that deal thematically with border-crossings, but also articles that examine movies that cross borders in genres and techniques. The articles have different theoretical approaches (Film theory, Cultural Studies, History, Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis) and cover films from well-known cinematic traditions (French, Spanish, German, and Italian) as well as lesser-known cinematic traditions (Yugoslavian, Greek, and Irish). As a whole, the essays frame the self-conscious gesture by European filmmakers to define European cinema as a work-in-progress, or at the very least, as a project that, like Europe itself, raises as many questions as it answers. ""This volume is a welcome addition to the growing critical literature on the evolution of the conception and practice of national cinema in Europe over the last two decades. Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon have chosen a solid selection of representative case studies that reflects different critical approaches to the problem of maintaining local or national cinema production in Europe during a period of intense globalization. Their insightful introduction formulates the theme of “unsettled borders” and “renegotiated identities” that will resonate in the nine essays that follow. With a focus on the critical concept of these unsettled borders, the various authors explore the ways that the traditional mark of national space has been transformed through political and economic realignments as well as new technologies and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers for whom national cinema no longer means what it did even twenty years ago. The volume provides a good balance of critical approaches that includes auteur studies, descriptions of state policies and the particular practices of filmmakers and producers in different parts of the continent (Spain, Germany, Ireland, the Balkans) and, finally, useful appendices that provide a close-up view of the complex nature of international co-productions."" —Marvin D’Lugo, Professor of Spanish, Clark University ""This is an interesting collection of essays that has been well conceived and organised. The standard of writing is high and I recommend publication. I particularly commend the conceptual framework underpinning the volume. This marries a cultural studies approach, which still dominates the study of film in Area Studies and language departments across Europe and the US (where filmic texts are increasingly used as teaching tools), with the more industry-based focus one tends to find adopted by Media and Screen Studies departments. Thus this collection will appeal to a wide range of students and academics. The introduction sets out the volume’s overarching framework cogently and clearly, giving a nuanced exploration of the way that the notion of the border can be used as a dynamic prism to help define and explore the limits of our understanding of Europe, European identity and European culture, within which cinema has long played a key role. The editors give a good account, for example, of the way film has been employed as a space to explore the possibilities of European integration by EU politicians as well as highlighting the flaws inherent within this project. They do, however, perhaps suggest a certain Western European/North American-centric view in their suggestion that the cinema of Yugoslavia, Greece or Ireland is somehow less well known than other national and transnational cinemas explored here. Less well known to whom? ... However, from the broad range of cinemas explored in the rest of the volume clearly this is not the case. Particular high points for me are the chapters on the work of Fatih Akin by Janis Little Solomon and John Davidson’s discussion of Schulze gets the Blues, as well as Olivier Asselin’s fascinating account of Database Cinema. This will be a good addition to scholarship on European film and I look forward to receiving my copy."" —Professor Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) ","""This volume is a welcome addition to the growing critical literature on the evolution of the conception and practice of national cinema in Europe over the last two decades. Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon have chosen a solid selection of representative case studies that reflects different critical approaches to the problem of maintaining local or national cinema production in Europe during a period of intense globalization. Their insightful introduction formulates the theme of “unsettled borders” and “renegotiated identities” that will resonate in the nine essays that follow. With a focus on the critical concept of these unsettled borders, the various authors explore the ways that the traditional mark of national space has been transformed through political and economic realignments as well as new technologies and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers for whom national cinema no longer means what it did even twenty years ago. The volume provides a good balance of critical approaches that includes auteur studies, descriptions of state policies and the particular practices of filmmakers and producers in different parts of the continent (Spain, Germany, Ireland, the Balkans) and, finally, useful appendices that provide a close-up view of the complex nature of international co-productions."" —Marvin D’Lugo, Professor of Spanish, Clark University ""This is an interesting collection of essays that has been well conceived and organised. The standard of writing is high and I recommend publication. I particularly commend the conceptual framework underpinning the volume. This marries a cultural studies approach, which still dominates the study of film in Area Studies and language departments across Europe and the US (where filmic texts are increasingly used as teaching tools), with the more industry-based focus one tends to find adopted by Media and Screen Studies departments. Thus this collection will appeal to a wide range of students and academics. The introduction sets out the volume’s overarching framework cogently and clearly, giving a nuanced exploration of the way that the notion of the border can be used as a dynamic prism to help define and explore the limits of our understanding of Europe, European identity and European culture, within which cinema has long played a key role. The editors give a good account, for example, of the way film has been employed as a space to explore the possibilities of European integration by EU politicians as well as highlighting the flaws inherent within this project. They do, however, perhaps suggest a certain Western European/North American-centric view in their suggestion that the cinema of Yugoslavia, Greece or Ireland is somehow less well known than other national and transnational cinemas explored here. Less well known to whom? ... However, from the broad range of cinemas explored in the rest of the volume clearly this is not the case. Particular high points for me are the chapters on the work of Fatih Akin by Janis Little Solomon and John Davidson’s discussion of Schulze gets the Blues, as well as Olivier Asselin’s fascinating account of Database Cinema. This will be a good addition to scholarship on European film and I look forward to receiving my copy."" —Professor Paul Cooke (University of Leeds) ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-04-01,Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge,City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair,Hardback,9781847181534,34.99,"City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair collects fourteen pathbreaking essays treating the panoramic oeuvre of novelist, poet, filmmaker and essayist Iain Sinclair. This book aims to reflect and develop the current strong interest in the work of Sinclair, who is widely recognized as one of the most significant figures in contemporary British literature and culture. The essays herein cover the key genres and periods of Sinclair’s output, discussing his poetry, prose and filmmaking, and are developed from the proceedings of the first academic conference on Sinclair, which was held at the University of Greenwich in 2004. Following the introductory chapter, which includes a brief survey of Sinclair’s career up until now, the collection is arranged thematically in four sections. The first part, ‘Contexts’, features essays which comment on the critical categorization and definition of Sinclair’s work. The second part, ‘Culture and Critique’, includes essays which explore the political import and contexts of Sinclair’s oeuvre. The articles in the third part, ‘Connections’, look at the links between Sinclair and other writers, addressing the often noted intertextuality of his writing; and the final section, ‘Spaces’, contains three considerations of Sinclair’s treatment of London’s urban spaces. This collection provides access to the latest research by the leading scholars working in this area, and will be a key point of reference for anyone interested in Sinclair’s production. “To some, the field of `London writing’ may increasingly look like an indifferent, over-populated wasteland. Iain Sinclair, however, remains pre-eminent, by virtue, not only of the amplitude of his knowledge of the city, but of the intensity and complexity of his thought about it. He is the redemptive memorialist of a host of disregarded London cultures that lie quite beyond the reach of contemporary pieties. In that respect, he is less our Blake, as he sometimes seems to believe, than our Pepys or our Defoe. At the same time, he is an audacious experimenter with prose forms in the modernist tradition from Joyce to Burroughs and beyond. Like the Sinclair phenomenon itself, this valuable collection of essays is multifaceted, illuminating its subject from a variety of different angles, whilst very well aware that it is part of a `work in progress’. It offers important testimony to the scope and power of a writer engaged in an original, serious and necessary project.” —Andrew Gibson, Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London “This is an important and timely collection about arguably the most significant living London writer who is increasingly being recognised as an important contemporary English author in every sense.” —Lawrence Phillips, Principal Lecturer in English, University of Northampton “At last, Iain Sinclair has the readers he deserves--at least on the ample, often provocative, and always fascinating evidence of City Visions, a collection of essays marked equally by panache and verve, awareness of alternative cultural history and theoretical sophistication. Over fourteen chapters, critics with wide-ranging interests gather their restless energies and obsessions in response to the scatter-gun agitprop and guerilla-intellectualism of Sinclair, to produce a necessary and necessarily edgy volume. In this admirably relentless collection Jenny Bavidge and Robert Bond offer an unnerving and inventive critical topography that uncovers the dark heart of a writer who is simultaneously the enfant terrible and éminence grise of English letters. Belles-lettrists and other dilettantes be warned, this is not a volume for the faint-hearted—these essays manifest an evangelical zeal equal to their subject's own; in doing so, they take us on an exhilarating intellectual adventure, so refreshing in the world of lit-crit, where the polite formulas of sensible reading make one want to faint from ennui.” —Professor Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough University ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-04-01,"Mark Goodall, Jill Good,Will Godfrey",Crash Cinema: Representation in Film,Hardback,9781847181480,29.99,"Crash Cinema: Representation in Film is a collection of essays that emerged from Crash Cinema an annual symposium that is an integral part of the Bradford Film Festival at the National Media Museum (UK). The symposium was created by academics and curators who share the common aim of promoting the importance of film both as an academic study and for critical public appreciation. Films can be enjoyed as entertainment, they can educate and inform and they can excite and disturb. Films are powerful pieces of culture. The films that we now ‘consume’ do more than simply amuse or horrify. Cinema not only thrills us but also communicates to us about ourselves and in the twentieth and twenty-first century moving images have become the dominant form of this communication. Bombarded by images, we inhabit a media intensive world in which every aspect of life is pervaded by visual signs. In these circumstances it becomes increasingly significant to engage with the politics of representation. Through this vital process we can acknowledge that all cultural forms, whether in high art or the mass media, are in the broadest sense political. We can also appreciate that it is a complex agenda of interests that shapes specific ideological meanings. Fulsomely equipped, we can apply this essential tool to the exciting task of decoding the political, social and cultural meanings articulated through the making, promotion and consumption of film. This book aims to offer an arena for the analysis of these representations. Representations cannot depict the ‘truth’ and the essays in this book do not claim to search for the ‘truth’. We ask whose ‘truth’ is being represented, how is it represented and why is it represented like that? We also ask how do representations tell us something about the culture within which they are created. Yet the essays in this volume are not ‘stuck’ in the representational concerns of the past and try instead to uncover the power of cinema to shock and surprise whether that be through visceral impact, subversive content, experiments with identity or the exploration of the taboo. Representation, as defined by the eleven essays in this book, is a fluid and dynamic approach to the study of film. The study of film, to which this book contributes some unique case studies, is as popular as ever and has withstood growing challenge from the new media such as CG Animations, the internet and computer, console and online gaming. This is because the pleasure of film is still the most humanistic and because the sophistication of the representations offered by cinematic expression remain ever more complex and pleasurable to decipher. This book can therefore be read by any student, academic, writer or filmmaker hooked on these delights. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-04-01,Silke Andris and Ursula Frederick,Women Willing to Fight: The Fighting Woman in Film,Hardback,9781847181428,34.99,"Women Willing to Fight is a collection of essays that explores the presence of the fighting woman in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Drawn from a variety of genres, the authors examine the changing role, image and position of this figure in film over recent decades. The increasing dominance of this character and her repositioning as a protagonist reinvigorates discussion concerning the dynamics of film narrative and spectacle. Each contribution takes as its focus a central character from the Hollywood blockbuster era, examining in detail the motivations and implications of the fighting female. In doing so the collection raises significant questions about the place of the fighting woman in contemporary media and the relationships she forges on and off-screen. With a strong appreciation of the mixed messages inherent in images of fighting women, Women Willing to Fight seeks to draw attention to the embodied forms - physical, intellectual and emotional - through which female fighters are represented. The anthology places particular emphasis on the emergence of the physically empowered woman, a character for whom the body has become a weapon and a target. While early cinematic representations allowed women to voice their fury and frustration, today’s female fighters not only ‘speak up’ but ‘muscle up’. Putting aside the supernatural powers of many action heroines, this volume focuses on the kinds of fighting skills, abilities and desires that are engendered in characterisations of mortal women. To this end the volume implicitly addresses complex and cross-cultural notions of ‘extra-ordinary’ power. By examining the embodied arsenal that these characters possess and develop - through training, conditioning, and life experience - it considers the representation of motivation and metamorphoses into ‘the fighting woman’: how a woman fights holds implicit meaning and inevitably urges us to consider why and what she is fighting for. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-05-01,Carmen Szabo,"""Clearing the Ground"": The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities",Hardback,9781847181800,34.99,"“Clearing the Ground”–The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities studies the Field Day Theatre Company, with special focus on the plays that they put on stage between 1980 and 1995; it attempts to dissect their policy and observe the way in which this policy influences the discourse of the theatrical productions. Was Field Day simply the “cultural wing” of Sinn Fein and the IRA, or did they try to give voice to a new critical discourse, challenging the traditional frames of representation? This book focuses on a thorough analysis of the way in which Field Day applied the concepts of postcolonial discourse to their own needs of creating a foundation for the ideological manifesto of the company. This study is a critique of the successes and failures of a theatre company that, in a period of political and cultural crisis, engaged in innovative ways of discussing the sensitive issues of identity, memory and history in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-05-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,Ein Kabinettstück der Schauspielkunst / A Showpiece of the Art of Acting: Ursula Dinkgräfes Bühnenlaufbahn / Ursula Dinkgräfe’s stage career,Hardback,9781847181770,29.99,"In diesem Buch zeichne ich die Theaterlaufbahn einer deutschen Theaterschauspielerin nach, Ursula Dinkgräfe, die in ihrer vierzigjährigen Zeit beim Theater, von 1947-1987, innerhalb der Theaterszene gut bekannt und hoch geschätzt war, die aber keinen Film-und Fernsehruhm auf sich zog. Dies Buch ist eine Ergänzung zur Starbiographie und schreibt ein bisher noch unberücksichtigtes Kapitel der deutschen Theatergeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: denn die Geschichte des Theater ist nicht nur die Geschichte weniger Stars, sondern die Geschichte von sehr, sehr vielen, und auch sehr guten Schauspielern, über die die breite Masse nie etwas erfährt. In this book I document the theatre career of a theatre actress in Germany, Ursula Dinkgräfe, who was well known and highly appreciated within the theatre scene of that country for the forty-year duration of her career from 1947 to 1987, but who did not achieve film and TV stardom. This book thus adds to the wider context of star biographies, and presents a hitherto unwritten chapter of German 20th century theatre history. The history of theatre is not only the history of a few stars, but also the history of very, very many, and indeed, very good, actors who never come to the attention of the wider public. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-08-01,Joseph Mills,A Century of the Marx Brothers,Hardback,9781847182401,34.99,"In 1905 Julius Marx began his vaudeville career with the singing group The Leroy Trio and was abandoned in the middle of the tour. It was an inauspicious start for the person who would become ""Groucho."" A hundred years later, the Marx Brothers have permeated our culture from the plastic noses and glasses worn at parties to a Smithsonian exhibition which explains DNA recombination using A Night at the Opera. Although they completed relatively few films together, the brothers have become icons, recognizable even to people who have never seen their movies. Most scholarly work on the Marx Brothers has focused on biographical aspects of their careers and lives; A Century of the Marx Brothers suggests a myriad of other useful approaches to their film and stage productions. The collection's eleven essays examine the Marx Brothers' work from a number of critical perspectives ranging from reader-response theory to film semiotics. The contributors include international scholars in a variety of fields, such as literature, cultural studies, performance studies, and film history. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-08-01,Sharon R. Yang,"The X-Files and Literature: Unweaving the Story, Unraveling the Lie to Find the Truth",Hardback,9781847182395,39.99,"The X-Files and Literature: Unweaving the Story, Unraveling the Lie to find the Truth provides an innovative and valuable exploration of the groundbreaking television program. Although much academic work has been devoted to the social, psychological, and spiritual significance of The X-Files, until this collection none has fully addressed the series’ rich adaptation of literature to interrogate our perception, definition, or recounting of the “truth.” This collection not only unveils new twists and insights into expected connections between The X-Files and Gothic writers or with its modernist and post-modernist slants on narrative, plot, and characterization. The X-Files and Literature also delves into some unexpected literary sources shaping the series, such as the Arthurian quest, Catholic and Biblical mythology, folkloristics, and James Fennimore Cooper and the “vanishing American” mythos. This collection of essays covers both how The X-Files works with literature’s own constantly morphing definition and portrayal of truth through form and content, as well as how the television program may or may not subvert our own contradictory expectations and distrust of literature’s providing us with enlightenment. ""As television becomes more and more literary, with shows like Lost and Gilmore Girls sending us off to the bookstore and the library so we might read them more carefully, a book like The X-Files and Literature is welcome indeed. Sharon R. Yang’s diverse collection on one of Nineties’ TV’s richest texts finds the truth of the gothic and the Arthurian and the folkloric, of the postmodern and the metafictional, of Poe, Pynchon, Cooper, Nabokov, and Tennyson, not just “out there” but in the perhaps too complicated narrative of the perpetually frustrated quests of Mulder and Scully. Valuable-in-itself as an intellectual exercise, its real worth may come when we put the book down and return, smarter, better readers, to the primary text."" --David Lavery, Co-Editor, Deny All Knowledge: Investigating The X-Files ""Sharon Yang's X-Files collection deals with an important subject addressed by thoughtful writers. The idea that television can be seen as a branch of literature is certainly sustained by The X-Files, and the contributors to this volume succeed in making the case. Brian Hauser on Fenimore Cooper, Cary Jones on Mary Shelley, Tamy Burnett on Poe, Thomas Argiro on Pynchon, Matthew VanWinkle on Tennyson-these and more explore the connections with The X-Files not only in terms of sources but also themes and techniques. Both students of television and literature will want to own this book."" —Rhonda V. Wilcox, Ph.D., Professor of English, Gordon College, Barnesville ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-09-01,Terri Ginsberg,Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology,Hardback,9781847182630,34.99,"This timely new monograph takes as its starting point the provocative contention that Holocaust film scholarship has been marginalized academically despite the crucial role Holocaust film has played in fostering international awareness of the Nazi genocide and scholarly understandings of cinematic power. The book suggests political and economic motivations for this seeming paradox, the ideological parameters of which are evident in debates and controversies over Holocaust films themselves, and around Holocaust culture in general. Lending particular attention to four exemplary Holocaust “art” films (Korczak [Poland, 1990], The Quarrel [Canada, 1990], Entre Nous [France, 1983], and Balagan [Germany, 1994]), this book breaks disciplinary ground by drawing critical connections between public and scholarly debates over Holocaust representation, and the often sophisticated cinematic structures lending aesthetic shape to them in today’s global arena. ","“What Norman Finkelstein has done in exposing the political foregrounding of the Holocaust Industry, what Giorgio Agamben has done in extrapolating the contemporary implications of homo sacer from the horrors of the concentration camps, Terri Ginsberg is doing with astonishing command and competence about Holocaust cinema. Ginsberg’s voice is clear, concise, liberating, and the harbinger of an entire new generation of scholarship in cinema studies."" Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University; Editor, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema “Terri Ginsberg's Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology is a much needed intervention in the field of Holocaust Studies in general and in Holocaust Cinema Studies in particular. What Ginsberg has fashioned is a reading of the Holocaust that is both immanent and materialist and much needed in these times when Holocaust scholarship is being shanghaighed by both ends of the political spectrum. It is Ginsberg's achievement that Holocaust cinematic texts are here restored to their historical moment in a way that must be accomplished if there is ever to be an understanding of how these texts might grasp the original moment of the tragedy. Her painstakingly thorough scholarship and theoretical rigor ensures that her work at least will not serve to promote the type of easy, knee-jerk response that simply adds flame to the fire and in the name of scholarship contributes to the perpetuation of other tragedies in the present Israeli–Palestinian situation.” Dennis Broe, Graduate Program Coordinator, Media Arts Department, Long Island University “Ginsberg ably demonstrates how the subgenre known as ‘Holocaust cinema’ has been co-opted by the culture industry. Bypassing the usual Hollywood touchstones, she focuses on four relatively neglected films that illuminate several key motifs that permeate many films on the subject: the “Christianization” of Jewish oppression, the commodification of genocide by both commercial and art house cinema, and the ethnocentric appropriation of the Holocaust by filmmakers with reactionary agendas. Eschewing the conformist platitudes of previous studies, Ginsberg’s book is a salutary and necessary provocation.” Richard Porton, co-editor, Cineaste; Author, Film and the Anarchist Imagination “Hollywood has produced more than 175 films on the Holocaust since the 1980s, and in fact by now the category is considered by some to constitute a virtual genre. Ginsberg challenges the under-examined status of these films and analyzes the work they perform to construct a revisionist discourse. Ginsberg’s astute understanding of cinematic strategies in addition to her confidence in distilling and unpacking even the most fraught of ideological discourses promise a groundbreaking and eminently useful study. Hers are important contributions which we very much need.” B. Ruby Rich, University of California-Santa Cruz; Author, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Movement “The importance of the Holocaust is beyond doubt. The importance of continuing the analysis and wide-ranging discussion of it is, at least in some circles. Here, in response, is an extremely scholarly and insightful treatment of Holocaust films and the aesthetic ideology that informs them. Sheds much light on several controversial problems connected to these horrific events. Highly Recommended.” Bertell Ollman, New York University; Author, Dance of the Dialectic ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Dimple Godiwala,Alternatives within the Mainstream II: Queer Theatres in post-war Britain,Hardback,9781847183064,39.99,"Alternatives Within the Mainstream II follows from the first volume’s dedication to a critical appreciation of and a tracing of trajectories of the theatres of our Others on the British stage. The first volume Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres traced a history of Black and Asian British plays, playwrights, theatre companies and theatre voices. The two volumes celebrate the plurality on the post-war British stage in terms of class, gender, race and sexualities. Alternatives Within the Mainstream II: Queer Theatres in Post-war Britain is an introduction to queer sexualities and their presence on the post-war British stage. From an introduction which addresses the possibilities of an undoing of repressiveness in desiring another, this volume charts a history of queer on the British stage, from a climate of sexual repressiveness and criminalisation, to a period of legal acceptance of homosexual desire. It covers gay, les, trans and queer British theatres, the influence of American queer theatre, AIDS consciousness, black queer theatre and television drama. Alternatives Within the Mainstream II: Queer Theatres in Post-war Britain is aimed as an introductory text which introduces the several plays, playwrights, theatre companies and queer theorists to students and scholars of contemporary queer British theatres. This book is dedicated to Anthony Blair and the Labour government for bringing in the Civil Partnerships Act. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Darren Waldron and Isabelle Vanderschelden,France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Cinema,Hardback,9781847183019,34.99,"This book focuses on the evolutions that have occurred in French popular cinema in recent years. It provides an extensive overview of some of the significant changes affecting a film market which is showing strong signs of revitalisation after years of Hollywood dominance. A number of domestic productions released since the late 1990s have rivalled American blockbusters in terms of audience figures and many of these big commercial successes are discussed in detail in this volume. The strength of this book lies not only in its timeliness in terms of its publication, but also in the fact that it combines case studies of films which enjoyed international appreciation as well as productions which were not distributed abroad. Consequently, the volume affords a unique insight into French films which resonate with audiences outside of France as well as those which are purely available to and enjoyed by local, domestic viewing groups. Moreover, many of the contributors to this volume extend beyond film analysis and explore the production, distribution and exhibition contexts as well as critical and audience reception. As a result, the book as a whole makes an original contribution to the growing area of French Film Studies and is intended to be enjoyed by students and scholars as well as keen followers of cinema in France. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Georges-Claude Guilbert,Literary Readings of Billy Wilder,Hardback,9781847183156,39.99,"Billy Wilder, hailed by most as a great filmmaker, often considered himself primarily as a writer. Yet to this day no publisher had thought fit to release literary interpretations of his work. Such an endeavor was clearly missing. The idea of this book is to offer academic but non hermetic readings of nine of his most significant films, informed by literary criticism, Gender Studies, semiotics, Film Studies, and the “artistic sensibility” of its contributors. Literary Readings of Billy Wilder should please film students, English students and Wilder fans alike. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,James Combs,Movie Time,Hardback,9781847183101,34.99," Movie Time is a study of temporal mythmaking in American popular movies. The work is rooted in American pragmatic philosophy and contemporary traditions of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. It proceeds on the premise that social beings and social orders are interested in the mediation of time, and attempt to make sense of their present world through the reconstruciton of important pasts of interest in the present, develop new presents with the help of popular expressions which define new situations and responses for a new time, and foresee possible futures which impinge upon life in the here-and-now. In particular, the work focuses on the subsequent treatment of the American 1950's in films set in that era, beginning in the 1970's and continuing, with an effort to create a rough taxonomy of mythemes in such retrospective films, and why it is that future times would find the Fifties to be so important that people wish to revisit it. Too, the mediation of time includes the development of a new present, in this case the emergence of conservatism as a social force in the 1970's and beyond. The movies were an important form of expression in the dramatization of the conservative myth, leading to the pervasion of conservative leaders and ideologies into the new century. Finally, the unrealized but imminent future of the country and world was increasingly on people's minds, as both millennial hopes and fears and unanticipated threats began to emerge at century's end, so movies which anticipated alternative futures appeared in response to that prospective interest. It is hoped that this present inquiry will stimulate further work on the social relevance of popular expression and in particular the social mediation of time. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson,Narration and Spectatorship in Moving Images,Hardback,9781847183095,39.99,"Philosophers and students of the arts have wondered since the time of Aristotle about the nature of aesthetic experience, and how this experience can seemingly be evoked by works of art. For more than a century producers and directors of motion pictures have made decisions about how to craft them based upon assumptions about complex stylistic devices and the effects such patterns of organization have on viewers. Over the past few years film scholars have made considerable progress in analyzing the manifold connections that exist between stylistic patterns and aesthetic effects for moving images of all kinds. In doing so, they have increasingly drawn upon insights and methodologies derived from psychology. The international conference from which this volume takes its contributions and its title, was organized to encourage the seeking of descriptive models pertaining to those elements of filmic construction that account for specific aesthetic experience. The focus of the current selection of twenty essays is therefore on the elements of filmic narration and their presumed aesthetic effects. The editors are pleased to strengthen the link between film studies and psychology in the interest of gaining tangible insight into the ancient mystery of the link between art and aesthetic experience. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Scott Magelssen and Ann Haugo,Querying Difference in Theatre History,Hardback,9781847183033,29.99,"Terms such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and pluralism are becoming increasingly problematic as we grapple with issues of identity in the “post-multicultural” discursive landscape of the twenty-first century. Querying Difference in Theatre History comprises sixteen scholarly case studies in which authors tease out the limitations of contemporary discourse concerning ideas of difference in theatre history today. The essays then incorporate new approaches, theories, and critical vocabulary for dealing with such issues. Unlike other works that address similar subjects, this volume arranges essays by mode of inquiry rather than by “kind of difference.” It offers essays that are complex and rigorous, yet accessible and pleasurable—ideal for use in graduate- and upper-division undergraduate theatre and performance classrooms. While “difference” may immediately conjure issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality, this volume also includes essays that examine differences more broadly construed: nationalisms, economic gradations, and so forth. Particular topics in this volume range from intersections of class-based and sex-based politics in theatrical performances during the French Revolution, constructions of blackness and whiteness in turn-of-the-century American brothel dramas, “fantasy heritage,” examinations of immigrant, exile, and refugee dramatic characters vis-à-vis notions of diasporic space, to the political and methodological dilemmas raised when dealing with an individual or event that is “repugnant” or “despicable” to the historian (e.g., anti-gay funeral protests). ","“For skeptics who dismiss identity and difference as solely contemporary concerns, this volume demonstrates the ongoing political and analytical vitality of thinking through differences by offering case studies across history and geography. These essays address both familiar and new objects from refreshing perspectives, and persuade readers of the importance of maintaining difference as a critical term in our scholarly and performance vocabularies. The assembled scholars also use historiography to stage conversations with practice and to create new genealogies through which to consider theatrical themes, styles, and values. Their ideas deepen our understandings of the place of identity and performance in social history.” Jill Dolan, Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama at the University of Texas at Austin “How do we perform difference? How do we understand difference in performance? Such questions have become increasingly compelling and complex with the spread of globalization and continuous expansions in international cultural traffic. Querying Difference in Theatre History provocatively addresses these questions not so much by looking at the present, but by looking back and examining what the processes of and moments in theatre history might add to this discussion of difference. This engaging critical anthology is notably diverse, crossing various geographic and historical periods, including a wide range of topics in performance from interculturalism to decolonialism and on to indigeneity. This volume offers a series of approaches to otherness that in their differences demonstrate how identity is always in flux and that cultural identities inevitably depend on positioning oneself in relation to an other. What the essays contained in this collection suggest is that querying difference needs to be a necessary politics and practice in theatre history studies. For students and scholars working in theatre historiography, this is a useful and thought provoking book.” Harry J. Elam, Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities Chair, Department of Drama Stanford University “For those of us who care about the future of the theatrical past, Querying Difference will open up fresh perspectives and new horizons of thought. Largely the work of younger scholars, the collection offers a variety of critical and methodological approaches to problems of “difference” – itself variably defined—across an array of case studies drawn from theatre history and performance studies. There is something in the brevity, wit, and conversational tone of each essay that makes them ideal for classroom use – it’s like having available sixteen visiting scholars to help present new ideas, provoke discussion, and inspire further work.” Tamara Underiner, Associate Professor of Theatre and Film at Arizona State University “Magelssen and Haugo achieve in one anthology what a three volume series might do, for their assembly of essays is so varied yet so collectively resonant. The assortment of topics and theoretical approaches in this book all contribute to a rich and complicated conversation about theatre history and the construction of difference. I found myself marking essays for my undergraduate students to read, and simultaneously making notes regarding my own research, so diverse were the theories and subjects scrupulously undertaken here by some of the best young thinkers in the field of theatre and performance studies. Indeed, Querying Difference in Theatre History reveals through sixteen essays--arranged methodologically--a provocative, sensitive, and often witty investigation of theatre, historiography, and the performance of difference.” Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Chair of Theatre at Miami University in Ohio ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Pavlína N. Šípová and Alena Sarkissian,Staging of Classical Drama around 2000,Hardback,9781847183187,34.99,"Classical drama on the modern stage as a cultural and political phenomenon is scholarly trailed since the 1950s and 60s and intensified in the last third of the twentieth century. The evidence is being extensively documented, pioneered by Walton (1987) and McDonald (1992) and subsequently developed by collaborative research projects which include published databases. It is clear from the work of these projects that performance of classical drama is a major feature in all types of theatre – avant-garde and experimental, student, international and fringe, epic and classical, commercial, popular and canonical. This means that it is closely intertwined with the politics of locale, environment and geography as well as of language, translation and culture. Each of the essays has a specialised contribution to make. However, the total impact of the whole section will be even greater than the sum of the parts because the authors not only intersect in their discussions of common concerns in modern performance of ancient drama but also provide case studies that will add to the knowledge base and critical acumen of everyone working in the field. ","""The book...covers a vast theatrical territory and puts forward the opinion of the young generation of researchers, who appear to be a generation highly educated in theatrical history and theory, free of prejudice and open to all that is new."" Eva Stehlikova, Prague, Folia Philologica, 131/2008/3-4 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-10-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,"Views, Positions, Legacies: Interviews with German and British Theatre Artists, 1985-2007",Hardback,9781847182944,34.99,"The proposed book collects 24 interviews that I conducted with German and British theatre artists over the period of 20 years. The first set of interviews focuses on British actors, directors and dramatists involved with Plays about Famous Artists. That section complements the material discussed in my book with CSP, Biographical Plays about Famous Artists. The second set of interviews focuses on German actors and directors involved with boulevard comedy theatre. That section complements the material discussed in my book with CSP, Boulevard Comedy Theatre in Germany. Interviews with two British theatre artists feature in the interviews in Part III: David Ian Rabey combines his job as a professor of Drama and Theatre at the University of Wales Aberystwyth with an active career as a theatre actor, director and dramatist. Mike Pearson is a performance practitioner and professor of Performance Studies in the same university department. The final part of the book provides a range of interviews both from the UK and from Germany, starting off with Sir Richard Eyre’s account of his seminal production of Hamlet at the Royal Court in 1980. German Director Heinz-Uwe Haus combines the legacy of Brecht (he trained with some of Brecht’s foremost disciples) and politics (Haus lived and worked in the former German Democratic Republic—the totalitarian regime’s repression influenced his everyday life and work considerably). Ursula Dinkgräfe, finally, represents both personal legacy and the numerous well-trained and highly capable and successful actors across the world who do not (want to) attain star-status. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-11-01,J. Chris Westgate,"Brecht, Broadway and United States Theater",Hardback,9781847183484,34.99," Not long after the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Bertolt Brecht’s name was on the lips of many writing about Broadway. Invoked knowingly—but not always knowledgeably—“Brecht” became something between marketing strategy and erudite justification for another season of Broadway musicals, another ignominy endured by the German playwright whose epic theater has only seldom been understood in the United States. To say that Brechtian and Broadway theatrical traditions represent divergence of philosophy, method, or ambition is to indulge—with the whimsy of Mark Twain—in understatement. Nevertheless, many references to Brecht since 2001 imply compatibility instead of contradiction—a confusion or corruption that suggested the need of looking closely at what Brecht wrote and intended in his epic theater more than seventy years after his first—and, unfortunately, typical—experience with United States theater. Beginning with the 1935 production of The Mother and moving through recent productions of political theater, including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Urinetown: The Musical, and My Name is Rachel Corrie, this anthology considers the encounters of Brecht and Broadway in terms of dramaturgy, performance, and reception. The essays in this anthology explore the political, cultural, and economic constraints shaping many of the encounters of Brecht and Broadway in U.S. theater history. This means looking at how, in many cases, epic theater has been co-opted and commodified by Broadway and what that commodification reveals about the culture of theater. Simultaneously, this means theorizing how epic theater finds—or can find—ways of providing a necessary bulwark against Broadway escapism, and what this suggests for the future of political theater in the U.S. What results is a dialectical history tracing Brecht’s encounters with Broadway, a history that opens-up and debates the complicated and often conflicted influence of Bertolt Brecht on United States theater. “Dr. Westgate's book on Brecht and Broadway is an excellent study of the reception of Brecht's work in the American theater and academe. Brecht, along with Moliere; Ibsen and Chekhov, is one of the most frequently performed playwrights in translation in America. A thorough investigation of the trajectory of Brecht stagings on Broadway has long been overdue. I am very grateful that Dr. Westgate has taken on the task and arrived at such a splendid result. The book is a must reading for any serious Brecht scholar.” —Carl Weber, Stanford Drama Department, Collaborator with Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, Director of many Brecht stagings in the U.S. “This is a provocative collection of essays outlining the sometimes unexpected connections between Brecht and the Broadway theatre. Like Brecht himself, these essays are playful, argumentative, and productively dialectical in their contradictions. The book is both entertaining and educational, and bound to provoke healthy debate. I recommend it as a demonstration of the ongoing relevance of Brechtian theories of theatre to the analysis of mainstream commercial theatre."" —Sean Carney, Associate Professor, McGill University ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-11-01,Bert Cardullo,"Cinematic Illusions: Realism, Subjectivity, and the Avant-Garde",Hardback,9781847183309,34.99,"Cinematic Illusions: Realism, Subjectivity, and the Avant-Garde"" is a collection of twelve essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and anti-realism (the experimental or non-representational) in film. The book treats not only the issue of realism versus anti-realism in the cinema, but also a number of subjects related to this issue: sex; violence; the avant-garde; subjective response versus objective creation; and the New American Cinema versus Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. In sum, Cinematic Illusions treats the subject of illusion from the point of view of the cinema’s unsurpassed ability to create not only the illusion of reality, but also the reality of illusion on the silver screen. There are a number of books that treat this subject from an abstract or theoretical point of view. The virtue of ""Cinematic Illusions"" is that it treats the subject in actual filmic practice and in highly readable yet at the same time subtly expressive prose. In combination with the subjects listed above, moreover, this collection of essays treats such major film directors as Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni--each of whom, in his own way, confronted the question of what constitutes realism in the cinema. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-12-01,Dan Friedman,The Cultural Politics of Heiner Müller,Hardback,9781847183965,29.99,"Heiner Müller was perhaps the most politically and artistically sophisticated and provocative of Europe’s post-World War II playwrights. He was a communist whose work was banned for years by the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic where he lived and worked. Müller offended the bureaucrats and political thugs who ran East Germany with his brutal, beautiful and honest dissection of the culture and politics in Eastern Europe. At the same time, Müller infuriated (or at least annoyed) the anti-communists and liberals of the West because he refused to leave the GDR or become a “dissident.” Starting as a protégé of Bertolt Brecht, Müller evolved into one of the great innovative poets of the 20th century, writing texts for the stage that seem to defy the limitations of the theater. Not only do his later texts have no plot, they are often devoid of specific characters and even dialogue. His work is a bridge between modernism and postmodernism in the theatre as well as between the East-West conflicts that defined the Cold War and the North-South conflicts are emerging in the post-communist world. In this unique collection, the first to focus on his cultural politics, some of the world’s leading Müller scholars and directors grapple with the political, artistic and ethical implications of Müller’s life and work at the start of the 21st Century. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe,Brechtian Theatre of Contradictions: Providing Moral Strength under Conditions of Dictatorship: A Festschrift for Heinz-Uwe Haus,Hardback,9781847184252,39.99,"Heinz-Uwe Haus (b. 1942), trained in the former German Democratic Republic as an actor and theatre director, among others as master disciple with some of Brecht’s immediate students and collaborators. He directed at the Deutsches Theater Berlin and became the leader of the Academy founded in the GDR to train theatre directors. A passionate opponent of the totalitarian regime, he developed his theatre practice as an active device to provide moral strength, under conditions of dictatorship, for himself, those who worked with him, and those who saw his productions. He was involved politically in the movement that led to the collapse of the GDR. Altogether, the material collected in this book, Haus’s own work, as well as commentaries by others from a range of perspectives, should serve not only as a documentation of the work of one major German theatre artist: it should support efforts to alert the present about aspects of the past that are all too easily and conveniently (both for all the wrong reasons), misrepresented, covered or hushed up, brushed aside and in due course forgotten. Theatre for Haus, during GDR times, was a means to survive, not only metaphorically. After liberation, post 1989, post GDR, theatre has lost nothing of its importance, quite the contrary. The book hopes to help understand both. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Peter Cochran,Byron at the Theatre,Hardback,9781847184276,34.99,"Byron at the Theatre is a collection of essays by a wide spectrum of European scholars, dealing with Byron’s dramas in a variety of ways. It starts with a long and detailed introduction on Byron and Drury Lane, incorporating much recent research done on the riotous and squalid conditions of the theatre in Regency London – conditions which go far towards explaining Byron’s distaste for the idea of theatrical success. There follows a chapter about the influence on Byron of Vittorio Alfieri, a vital subject which has not been written about thoroughly for over a century, and which goes far to explain what motivated Byron’s experiments in classical drama. The main body of the essays discuss Byron’s plays from thematic perspectives, and examine Byron himself as a figure in the dramas of Goethe and Stoppard. There is a chapter on Rudolph Nureyev’s little-known Manfred ballet, and another on Byron himself as a dramatic performer. Byron at the Theatre is a vital book for anyone interested in this much-discussed but little-understood aspect of Byron’s life and work. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,"Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2007",Hardback,9781847184184,44.99,"The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Second International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, May 5-7, 2007. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessor in 2005, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen six volumes in print, with another twenty in press or in the process of being written. The conference also marked the launch of the second volume in the Intellect series Theatre and Consciousness with Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts. The 2007 conference and the two book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski,In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation,Hardback,9781847184023,34.99,"This volume explores a timely and controversial theoretical issue in cinematic adaptation studies: the necessity and value of fidelity as a yardstick by which to measure film adaptations of literary and dramatic works. Recent publications in the field have argued that adaptation criticism has been too focused on fidelity and unjustly privileges the literary source over the film adaptation. Film theorists who object to this perceived bias recommend that criticism of film adaptations develop a more intertextual paradigm, following the tenets of post-structuralist literary theory. Yet this approach risks throwing the field into chaotic relativism. The essays in this volume suggest, rather, that there is now a continuum of critical perspectives that use fidelity, or the comparative methodology which is its essence, both more and less as a benchmark for critiquing and evaluating film adaptations. Similarly, cinematic adaptations themselves have for some time operated on a spectrum of more or less fidelity to their primary literary or dramatic sources. A plurality (rather than an infinity) of critical approaches allows the field of adaptation studies to express a breadth of perspectives and interests while still maintaining the relational heart of the enterprise. All the chapters in this book were initially plenary lectures, individual papers, or panel presentations (with discussion) heard at the Literature/Film Assoiation annual conference held at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2005. The in/fidelity continuum is organized as follows. Early essays express the desire for fidelity in film adaptation and/or demonstrate the ways in which several films, despite some textual and contextual interference, manage to remain relatively faithful to literary sources in one way or another. The next essays show how textual and contextual influences draw film adaptations into infidelities of various kinds. Later chapters offer examples of cinematic adaptations which have tenuous connections to their alleged sources or critique central elements of those sources. After a post-structuralist analysis of adaptation theory, the panel and following discussion provide some arguments both for and against fidelity criticism, including reasons for its persistence and ways to break its continuing, though changing, spell. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Dan North,Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films,Hardback,9781847184269,34.99,"Many British films never make it to the screen. Obstacles of finance, censorship, distribution or creative breakdown can appear in their way, and they might even fail to get beyond the script stage. This book collects new essays by leading scholars that use archival resources to reconstruct the stories behind a range of films by prominent film-makers. These thwarted productions are all too often excluded from histories of British cinema, but the accounts of their unmaking contained in Sights Unseen provides an illuminating insight into the factors which have served to undermine the stability of the film industry in Britain. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-01-01,Daniel Watt and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,"Theatres of Thought: Theatre, Performance and Philosophy",Hardback,9781847184245,29.99,"Theatre, fundamentally, makes things appear. Philosophy, fundamentally, makes things appear. Philosophy is at work in all disciplines. The issue is less about bringing them together but rather articulating the fact that they, like science and art, have never been truly apart. Theatre has been gradually increasing its theoretical articulation over decades, fascinated by the possibility of transforming thought into spectacle. The essays collected in this volume address these issues from wide-ranging perspectives and approaches. They arise from meetings of the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group at the 2005 and 2006 conferences of TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association), and from papers presented under the auspices of CTPP (Centre for Theatre, Performance and Philosophy) at Aberystwyth University. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-02-01,Virginia Apperson and John Beebe,The Presence of the Feminine in Film,Hardback,9781847184467,39.99,"This pioneering book introduces a largely unremarked dimension of film, the “feminine,” which cannot be reduced to women’s experience, or to men’s projections onto women. The Presence of the Feminine in Film gives body to that often rather loosely formulated Jungian conception, the “feminine aspect of psyche,” by noticing what “feminine” turns out to mean in particular cinematic contexts. Spanning seven decades—from Pride and Prejudice, Notorious, and Letter from an Unknown Woman to Monsoon Wedding, Brokeback Mountain, and The Lives of Others—the movies selected for particular study here make it clear that the feminine is at home in the movies, and that when she appears, it is to appeal to our sensibilities as well as to our senses. This is a book that will enhance the appreciation of film as a depth psychological medium. ","Jungians and film criticism are made for each other. There is so much here that is illuminating--it completely changed my way of looking at movies, not only in applying the Jungian vocabulary to a medium in need of one, but also because of the brilliant insights into the many ways auteur filmmakers have found to depict the feminine, from Alfred Hitchcock’s preoccupation with the challenged goddesses in Notorious, Vertigo, and Marnie, to Max Ophuls’ evocation of the all-but-forgotten anima in Letter from an Unknown Woman, to contemporary celebrations of her presence in Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. John Beebe's classic essay on the Anima in Film opened all this up to me, but each essay added to my understanding of the way archetypes are deployed in all movies. Diane Johnson, author of The Shadow Knows, Le Divorce, and other novels and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Virginia Apperson’s and John Beebe's fascinating book weaves together cinematic, theoretical and psychoanalytic discourses in demonstrating the complex ways that images of women in movies become images of a more pervasive cultural feminine that is deeply internalized in all of us. Rich in psychological insights and perceptive analyses, The Presence of the Feminine in Film carries the implications of cinematic representations into the realms of gender and cultural studies, sexuality and the unconscious. Whitney Chadwick, author of Women, Art, and Society ""This very readable and enjoyable book is essential reading for all those interested in cinema and in the feminine, but it is also a good example of the kind of original approach that Jungian theory has to offer film studies."" Angela Connolly, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2009, No. 54 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-03-01,Bert Cardullo,Comparative Stages: Essays in the History of Euro-American Drama,Hardback,978-1-4438-0190-4,39.99,"This is a collection of essays whose title more or less explains its contents. In Comparative Stages, the author attempts to chart some of the high points in the history of Western drama, from the Greeks to our contemporaries: ancient Athenian tragedy, Shakespearean historical comedy, French neoclassicism, and modern as well as avant-garde Euro-American drama. In addition, one can find here an examination of postwar Italian plays and a survey of German-language comedy from its origins to the twentieth century. Comparative Stages: Essays in the History of Euro-American Drama is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive history of the drama, Western or otherwise. But the book is intended to display a critical approach—historically contextual at the same time as it is intrinsically or organically analytical—that could lead to such a history, for there has not been anything even resembling one in quite some time. Let it be emphasized that this is a reference to a history of dramatic form—of the formal permutations the drama has undergone during its history and the philosophico-aesthetic as well as socio-political reasons for these stylistic-cum-structural permutations—not to a history of the theater or theatrical production (of which volumes there have been plenty). It is to be hoped that, with this collection of essays, the prefatory dialogue necessary to the undertaking of just such a history of Western, if not world, drama has at least begun. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-04-01,Lance Norman,Dismemberment in Drama / Dismemberment of Drama,Hardback,9781847184894,29.99,"Dismemberment in Drama / Dismemberment of Drama is an essay collection which considers the dramatic possibility contained in the images and narratives of dismemberment frequently recurring on the western stage. The Classical Tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, the Romanticism of Kleist, the surrealism of Artaud, and the contemporary drama of Suzan-Lori Parks and Marina Carr are just some of the fractured and fragmented bodies analyzed in this collection. Both individually and in concert the contributors ask what a dismembered body means. Such an inquiry allows them to confront dismemberment as a theoretical category which understands such twentieth-century innovations as the Theatre of Cruelty, the Epic Theatre, the Open Theater, and documentary theatre as part of a long dramatic tradition. Dismemberment in drama examines the tenuous bond between representation and the object being represented by highlighting the dismemberment of drama as a form that occurs during drama’s repeated theorizations of its own enactment. There is a conflict between disintegration and unity inherent in mimesis, theatrical phenomenology, and performance. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-04-01,Anthony D. Hughes with Miranda J. Hughes,Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films,Hardback,9781847185136,34.99," Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films closely examines a wide variety of major filmic texts that have established permanent, iconic shifts in modern and postmodern US culture and filmic practices. These films and their often visionary, trend-setting auteurs each introduced new manners of seeing that were imitated by later directors and ultimately, absorbed by popular culture itself. The primary rationale for writing this collection was quite simple: it is new and different. No anthology exists that examines the concept of the cutting edge film across such a remarkably wide variety of genres and with such a diversity of theoretical approaches and subject matter. Equally important, all the contributors bring a unique voice and multi-disciplinary perspective to their respective chapters. This anthology will be of great interest to scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film studies, historical studies, and gender and genre studies. As far as possible, contributors have minimized a great deal of typical theoretical terminology so that lay readers who possess some familiarity with basic film analysis and theory can understand the text. It can be used as a classroom text in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate film classes. Modern and Postmodern Cutting Edge Films is an anthology that instructors of film theory and history can use for many years to come. Indeed, we feel that this remarkable collection of essays will itself become an indispensable, cutting edge text of film scholarship. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-04-01,Paula Murphy,"The Shattered Mirror: Irish Literature and Film,1990-2005",Hardback,9781847185013,29.99,"The Shattered Mirror: Irish Literature and Film, 1990-2005 is a response to changing representations of Irish identity. Interrogating the period of the 'Celtic Tiger' in Ireland, which was accompanied by widespread social change, the book draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore issues such as prosperity, Europeanism, Diaspora, multi-culturalism, decline in religious faith and gender norms. Examining three writers and filmmakers in each section on narrative, drama and film, The Shattered Mirror argues that, in this fifteen years, Irish identity has changed radically. "," “Dr. Murphy’s The Shattered Mirror: provides a badly needed assessment of what some Irish dramatists, fictional writers and film makers make of the seismic period commonly referred to as ‘The Celtic Tiger.’” Dr. Eamon Maher, Director, National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, ITT Dublin, “Paula Murphy furnishes us with a fresh and searching overview of the contemporary cultural moment in Ireland and charts it more completely than anyone has done to date.” Anne Fogarty, Professor of James Joyce Studies, University College Dublin “For anyone who wants to know about contemporary Ireland and about how contemporary Irishness is a diverse and plural text, The Shattered Mirror is a must-read!” Dr. Eugene O’Brien, Head of Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-05-01,Polona Petek,Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research,Hardback,9781847185440,34.99," Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research came about as a response to the recent shift of focus in the studies of cinema. While the seventies and the eighties were marked by increasingly complex theorisations of spectatorship, the last two decades have witnessed a turn towards ethnographic research into film reception. However, this long overdue turn towards the empirical viewer has not produced a genuinely broader scope of analysis. It has rather, all too hastily, consigned the spectator, a textually constructed viewing position, to oblivion, thanks to the concept’s perceived hegemonic and totalising premise. Echo and Narcissus intervenes into this state of affairs by arguing for a productive nexus between theorisations of spectatorship and the currently more fashionable audience research. Petek maintains that an informed mapping of contemporary (and past) filmviewing practices still requires a spectatorial model and she offers such a model through a re-reading of Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus. She demonstrates that the myth’s central role in traditional theorisations of spectatorship has not yet been properly reflected upon. Her critical recuperation of the Ovidian myth provides a revised model of the spectator—one with discursive access to all types of cinema, yet, flexible enough to accommodate a range of viewers’ responses and their cultural diversity. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-05-01,Bert Cardullo,"Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiraostami, and Zhang Yimou; Essays and Interviews",Hardback,9781847185310,34.99," Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, and Zhang Yimou is a collection of interviews with, and essays about, the four filmmakers who introduced the cinema of their respective countries to the West: Kurosawa (Japan) and Ray (India), in the 1950s; Kiarostami (Iran) and Zhang (China), in the 1980s. Kurosawa and Ray were post-World War II phenomena, as the new breed of American cinephiles demanded more contact with Asian cultures of which they had known little until the 1940s. Kiarostami and Zhang, for their part, are both post-revolutionary filmmakers whose films have helpfully introduced Americans to two Eastern cultures with which the American government has long had—and continues to have—a problematic relationship. As a whole, then, Out of Asia documents an alternative to Western brands of cinema even as these four “foreign” directors, with the possible exception of Kiarostami, integrate Western forms, styles, and genres into their own native traditions. As such, these artists could be said to represent a global filmmaking perspective that now, more than ever, this world—and the American nation—can use. Each of the interviews in this volume is accompanied by an overview of the director’s career or an essay on representative films by him. In addition, Out of Asia is preceded by a contextualizing introduction; it is followed by filmographies, a bibliography, and an index; and the book is interspersed with photographs of the four directors in question or stills from their films. There are books devoted to individual filmmakers like Kurosawa, Ray, Kiarostami, and Zhang, but, until Out of Asia, there has not been one that treats representatives of four national cinemas from their own point of view, as well as from an international perspective. ","""Bert Cardullo is a perceptive interviewer and sets up some interesting comparisons between the directors"" Roger Macy, Screening the Past, January 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-05-01,Bert Cardullo,"The Movies on my Mind: Selected Criticism, 2002-2007",Hardback,9781847185532,39.99,"The main purpose of The Movies on My Mind: Collected Criticism, 2002-2007 is to stake out territory for a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, the author offers close readings of individual films that go beyond simple plot summaries and vague impressions about acting (the province of the newspaper review), on the one hand, yet that pull up short of arid hermetic academic discourse (the province of the scholarly monograph), on the other hand. With elegance, clarity, and rigor, the author tries ever to demonstrate that the cinema means as well as shows, and his ultimate aim is to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant humanistic goals. Thus, in addition to chronicling the vitality and richness of international film art, The Movies on My Mind aims to facilitate its understanding and appreciation. To wit, the reviews—or, better, chronicles—contained in The Movies on My Mind are acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic senses of those words; they are neither theoretical musings nor pedantic tracts. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists. These include, in the present collection, directors from such countries as France, England, the United States, Austria, Iran, Italy, Israel, Senegal, Afghanistan, Sweden, Finland, Columbia, (post-Soviet) Georgia, Japan, Argentina, South Korea, and Belgium. Contemporary films like The Passion of the Christ, The Pianist, The Hours, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are treated, as well as classics like Winter Light, La Strada, To Be or Not to Be, and How I Won the War. These review-essays themselves are supplemented by a bibliography of related criticism, directors’ filmographies, individual film credits, and a thoroughgoing index. There are other books on international, art-house cinema, but there are few that feature the international or global perspective of The Movies on My Mind. It is to other collections of film criticism that this book should be compared, however, since its real strength is critical. And there aren’t very many recent books that provide this kind of close analysis of contemporary movies together with a number of classics, and of some important directorial and critical careers as well. The Movies on My Mind thus offers a refreshing, readable alternative to both the facile, stargazing monographs that one can find in any chain bookstore and the arcane academic publications that deal with phenomenology, historiography, the politics of gender, race, and class, and the cognitive dissection of film style and technique. "," ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-06-01,Christie Fox,Breaking Forms: The Shift to Performance in Late Twentieth-Century Irish Drama,Hardback,9781847185846,24.99,"Ireland in the 1990s experienced fast, immediate, and radical social change. Dubbed the “Celtic Tiger,” the Irish economy provided for changes in the arts landscape as well, particularly as an outlet for the expression of this change. A profound shift in Irish drama, expressed as an attempt to redefine what a play is, what an audience is – regardless of the theme of the work – allowed for a replication of this societal change in the theatre. Theatre artists collaborating to bring physicality to the Irish stage sought to explore, express, and reflect a part of society that they felt could not be represented naturalistically. They rejected nostalgia and indeed often mocked it. The newly emerging Irish theatre de-privileged the author and moved away from the literary tradition to incorporate performance techniques and movement on an equal basis to the written text. These productions emphasized the visual because artists found that words alone could not express the inchoate emotions brought on by globalization and cultural shifts. Breaking Forms is an attempt to provide a vocabulary for talking about Irish performance and an incursion in the understanding and definition of the idea of Irish gesture. The manuscript profiles several theatre companies to find common ground and provide an analysis of their performances, theatre, and texts. ","""Under the rubric 'theatre of movement' Breaking Forms invites the reader to explore some of the most creative and exciting performances on Irish stages (and streets) in recent decades. Christie Fox opens up the lines of European influence on Irish performance practices, from Berkoff to Lecoq, Grotowski to Bausch, in this accessible, lively, and stimulating volume."" Cathy Leeney, College Lecturer, School of English, Drama and Film, University College, Dublin Breaking Forms opens a valuable inquiry in to some of the most popular performances in Ireland--street theatre, pageants, puppetry as well as landmark productions and revivals. Fox’s insightful contribution lies not only in documenting these developments, but in framing the scholarly and popular context to the critical “shift to performance” in recent Irish theatre. Joan Dean ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-06-01,"David Cooper, Christopher Fox and Ian Sapiro",CineMusic? Constructing the Film Score,Hardback,9781847185938,34.99,"What has been described as second generation film musicology is both building on, and challenging the orthodoxies of, the pioneering work of scholars who published in the final two decades of the twentieth century. CineMusic? Constructing the Film Score is representative of this new scholarship, approaching the construction of the film score from a number of perspectives, from the primarily practical to the more abstract and theoretical. The films that form the basis of these reflections are similarly diverse, from art-house to mainstream, classical to postmodern. This volume includes essays by established and upcoming scholars and practitioners as well as interviews with two of the UK’s most influential film composers—Trevor Jones (Mississippi Burning, Brassed Off!, Notting Hill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and Michael Nyman (The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Piano, Gattaca, The Libertine). An afterward by Anahid Kassabian proposes a number of areas that are ripe for further exploration. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-06-01,Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain,Hunger on the Stage,Hardback,9781847185952,34.99,"In his short story “The Hunger Artist,” Kafka imagined the theatrical career of a “professional faster” whose performance consists merely in displaying his own starving body before an avid audience. Kafka thus paradoxically suggested that hunger, mere emptiness working its way through declining bodies, may be a privileged theatrical object. Hunger often signals an anchorage in socio-historical reality, and invites extreme situations on stage, articulating large-scale cataclysms (famines, the devastation of war) with personal tragedies (hunger-strikes, anorexia, etc.) in which characters experience the tenuousness of their own lives. Whether in the comic or in the tragic mode, staged hunger metaphorizes various kinds of starvation – material greed, spiritual, emotional, sexual starvation, and even linguistic insufficiency. This volume explores the aesthetic and ethical issues raised by hunger on the stage in the English-speaking world. It investigates the paradox of the hypervisibility of the thinning body and shows how, throughout history, hunger has given shape to innovative, powerfully transgressive dramaturgies. "," ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-06-01,Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdoğan,Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context,Hardback,9781847184733,39.99,"Continuity and change are the two major trends that mark European film and media vistas today. While continuity is the result of more than a century of European film and media tradition, change is brought about by technological convergence, the evolution of globalization and commercial markets and of artistic and aesthetic norms, and the ever-expanding cultural borders of Europe. Bringing together eighteen research-based analyses on topics as diverse as Europe itself, Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context presents various accounts of filmic and televisual media, text and form, mediated politics, media policy, globalization, diasporic media, multiculturalism and more. The chapters are grouped into three main sections: Identities, Borders, Industries; Migration, Space, Transnationality; and Telling Stories: Medium, Form, Message and Beyond. Employing film studies, critical social theory and cultural studies and drawing upon technological, spatial, political economic, sociological and anthropological approaches, the authors present multidimensional and multi-faceted depictions of the historical and contemporary factors that have shaped, and continue to shape, film and media in Europe. “Ambitious in both its intellectual and geographical scope, this volume provides us with an innovative and original understanding of what is happening in the new and rapidly changing European cinema scene – a very welcome intervention in an important cultural agenda.” ¬¬Kevin Robins, City University, London “Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdogan have edited an excellent book on film and media landscapes in the ""new"" Europe of the early twenty-first century. Incorporating eighteen individual chapters in three parts, the book re-examines what ""European"" media and cinema means during a period in which the geographical and cultural boundaries of ""Europe"" are still shifting, the media themselves are deeply influenced by the digital revolution, and audiences for ""film"" are constantly re-defining themselves. The book itself offers fresh perceptions across a range of different fields and should be of interest to all those fascinated by current trends in both film and media.” Melvyn Stokes, University College London ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-07-01,Andrew Lynch and Anne Scott,Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context: Essays for Christopher Wortham,Hardback,9781847186102,39.99,"Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context is a stimulating refereed collection of new work dedicated to Emeritus Professor Christopher Wortham of The University of Western Australia. The essays provide a rich context for the interdisciplinary study of the English Renaissance, from its medieval antecedents to its modern afterlife on stage and screen. Their up-to-date engagement with many scholarly fields - art and iconography, cartography, cultural and social history, literature, politics, theatre, and film - will ensure that this book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary Renaissance studies, with a special interest for those researching and teaching English literature and drama. The nineteen contributors include distinguished Renaissance scholars such as Ann Blake, Graham Bradshaw, Alan Brissenden, Conal Condren, Joost Daalder, Heather Dubrow, Philippa Kelly, Anthony Miller, Kay Gililand Stevenson, Robert White, and Lawrence Wright. Work on Shakespeare forms the core of this coherent collection. There are also significant essays on Magnificence, Donne, Marlowe, A Yorkshire Tragedy, Jonson, Marvell, the Ferrars of Little Gidding, and female conduct literature. hardbound with dust jacket; xii+353 pp; 18 b/w illustrations. ","“Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context: Essays for Christopher Wortham offers the reader an exciting range of probing enquiries into early modern texts as artworks and cultural documents. Firmly anchored in fresh approaches to canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne and Marvell, this illustrated collection is conceptually expansive, drawing in more minor works as it reaches back to medieval drama and classical precedents and forward to film and the novel. As a showcase of primarily Australian, yet also global, scholarship from established and newer researchers, Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context pursues fascinating textual minutiae and raises provocative, larger questions about the period. These contributions, bookended with reflections on an impressive academic life, make the volume a worthy tribute to Professor Wortham.” Dr Liam Semler, Department of English, University of Sydney “Prismatically reflecting the many and varied interests of the scholar it celebrates, Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context: Essays for Christopher Wortham will delight all those interested in the exploration of early modern literature and culture. Its contributors have obviously been provoked by the occasion to produce of their best, and the essays collected here crackle with critical energy. Tudor drama, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne and Marvell all feature in discussions rich in insights and original contextualization; contemporary cartography, cosmology and mythology are explored; women's lives and authorship are discussed in fascinating detail; and essays on the legacy of 'the Shakespearean moment' in our own contemporary culture in creative writing and film point to the enduring power and interest of the poetry and drama celebrated here. A worthy Festschrift, and a rich feast indeed.” Dr Ronald Bedford, School of Arts, University of New England ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-07-01,Florian Grandena,Showing the World to the World: Political Fictions in French Cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s,Hardback,9781847186041,29.99,"The book focuses on the interest in socio-political themes that marked many French film productions of the 1990s and early 2000s. In order to underline the main characteristics and the originality of these feature films (political fictions), the author addresses the following questions: o How can one explain the renewed interest in contemporary French society? o To what extent can political fictions be described as political? o What is the contribution of political fictions to what some critics and scholars have described as a new type of realism? Showing the World to the World primarily addresses to the critical and socio-political context in which political fictions were made and released. With these parameters in mind, the book then moves on to in-depth discussions of films that have already attracted some attention, such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Drôle de Félix, as well as lesser known works, Siegrid Alnoy’s Elle est des nôtres and Jean-Marc Moutout’s Violence des échanges en milieu tempéré being some examples. Showing the World to the World makes an original contribution to theoretical debates on political cinema and to the field of French film studies. The study targets students and academic researchers as well as individuals with a keen interest in contemporary French cinema. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-08-01,Kylo-Patrick R. Hart,Film and Television Stardom,Hardback,9781847186287,39.99,"Film and Television Stardom examines film and television stars as a collectively complex, intriguing social phenomenon from the early twentieth century to the present day. Its range of topics includes (but is certainly not limited to) the emergence and historical development of the star system, silent-film stardom, stardom and media spectatorship, stardom and consumption, stardom and the paparazzi, reality-television “stars,” stars in the news, and studies of individual stars. In addition to providing numerous new insights and approaches to exploring the phenomenon of film stardom (past and present), its various chapters significantly expand the comparatively nascent body of academic writing that has been devoted to investigating the historical and theoretical aspects of television stardom by focusing on both traditional television programming genres and the more recent phenomenon of reality-television programming. The numerous stars addressed in this book (including Roseanne Barr, Gertrude Berg, Ingrid Bergman, Cher, Sacha Baron Cohen, Bette Davis, Jodie Foster, Jerry Lewis, Carmen Miranda, Anita Page, Jessica Simpson, and James Stewart) are analyzed in relation to noteworthy performances in a variety of well-known films (including The Accused, The Broadway Melody, Cinderfella, Citizen Kane, Dark Victory, The Man from Laramie, Persona, and Singin’ in the Rain) and television programs (including Da Ali G Show, The Apprentice, The Goldbergs, Roseanne, and Survivor). ","""Film and Television Stardom is important because it looks at stars as positioned in mass culture and investigates the star phenomenon as both individual person and complex set of cultural processes. At a time when scholarly interest in the field of stardom is on the rise, the book’s combination of cutting-edge research and keen sense of the past sets it apart from other anthologies"" — CATHERINE R. BURKE, New York City-based librarian and media educator ""One of the most impressive aspects of this anthology is its meticulous and ultimately quite fascinating historical research. Due to the diversity of its subjects and methodological approaches, Film and Television Stardom will lend itself to a variety of courses and research agendas."" — AMANDA ANN KLEIN, Assistant Professor, East Carolina University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-08-01,Desmond Hosford and Charles Wrightington,Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France,Hardback,9781847186553,34.99,"As an aesthetic notion and dramatic genre, tragedy has enjoyed a privileged place in French culture, particularly during the early modern period when debates over its nature and philosophy reflected fascination with a style whose fundamental principles were drawn from ancient Greek sources. Through the works of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, routinely cited for an alleged regularity of form and content exemplifying the academic notion of French Classicism, tragedy has grounded the French literary canon. Because of its place at the heart of canonical French literary studies, tragedy’s traditionally prescribed boundaries and interpretations have rarely been questioned. Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France challenges conventional notions of the nature and function of tragedy and the ends to which philosophical, theatrical, and performative aspects of the tragic were appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The scope of material explored in this volume will be of interest not only to scholars and students of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, but to those working in areas such as theater, gender studies, aesthetics, history, religion, philosophy, classics, and cultural studies. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,William Hope,"Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion, Cognition, Cinema",Paperback,9781847187703,14.99,"The nature of the spectator’s emotional and intellectual engagement with films has attracted increasing critical scrutiny over the past decade, and theoretical frameworks have been elaborated to analyse how and why viewers are moved by what they see on screen. Viewer responses are influenced by factors including genre expectations, involuntary physiological reactions to what is seen and heard, shifting attachments towards screen characters, and by specific devices within a film’s mise-en-scène, such as lighting and colour. Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion; Cognition; Cinema is a film-by-film analysis of the work of the Oscar-winning director, a study that examines the nature of the strong affective charge that characterizes his films, and which also explores the cognitive and intellectual appeal of Tornatore’s cinema. The volume illustrates the ways in which an affective and intellectual synergy can develop between a film’s aesthetics and its conceptual agenda, as instantiated by films such as the celebrated Cinema Paradiso. The affective power that characterizes Tornatore’s work has long been acknowledged by critics, and while analysing the configurations of visual, aural, and narrative devices that generate such intensely poignant viewing experiences, the volume also elucidates the ways in which the director’s stylistic approach intensifies the significance of a range of social and cultural questions affecting Western society, issues that lie at the heart of his films. Reviews of the Book: ""Giuseppe Tornatore is one of the few authentically original voices to emerge in the cinematic world over the past quarter century. He champions community values, solidly grounded in emotional engagement and interaction, over the brash, loud, self-proclaiming egocentricity that has increasingly dominated western societies since the nineteen-eighties and, paradoxically, isolated the individual ever more intensely within his own subjective world. Yet, viewed superficially, his narratives appear old-fashioned, flirting frequently and precariously with overt melodrama and sentimentalism while managing nevertheless to mount a powerful critique of what our societies have become and what they have sacrificed that makes them the poorer. Eschewing the alienating, ironical deconstructionism of most of his contemporaries, Tornatore subtly employs every technical device at his disposal to enforce the spectator’s identification with the wistfulness of his protagonists, in their growing awareness of a sense of personal loss and nostalgia. Yet, this fulfils only part of his intention, for having snared us in a tangle of emotions, he then, in Pirandellian fashion, propels us towards the moment of intellectually-charged reflection, in which the film’s apparently negative terminus ad quem is transformed into the forceful negation of those contemporary values that have brought about the protagonist’s sense of moral and affective dislocation. William Hope’s authoritative study carefully charts these processes as they unfold within individual films and across successive films, not neglecting, when appropriate, to comment on Tornatore’s continual refinements and extensions of his conceptual framework and applications of his visual techniques. However, this book goes well beyond illustration of a thesis for it is also concerned with how we watch films and react to them and how, through carefully judged juxtapositions of his material, use of cameras, variations in intensity of music or silences, and so on, Tornatore is able to make use of this essentially psychological knowledge to manoeuvre his spectators towards a realisation of his own cinematic, which is to say, moral vision of the contemporary world."" Professor Doug Thompson, University of Hull ""William Hope's work gives to the cinema of Tornatore the degree of analytical thoroughness that it merits, (but which, until now, has not been afforded to this important contemporary director). The book offers a clear overview of Tornatore's films, and of the social and cultural context within which they are produced. Hope assesses the relevance of contemporary critical theory to the reception of Tornatore's work and especially to Cinema Paradiso. In so doing, he makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Tornatore as a film-maker."" Pauline Small, Queen Mary College, University of London ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Ann C. Hall,"Making the Stage: Essays on the Changing Concept of Theatre, Drama, and Performance",Hardback,9781847188304,34.99,"MAKING THE STAGE is a collection of essays that examines the role of theatre, drama, and performance in contemporary culture, a culture that is growing increasingly technological and isolated--seemingly at odds with the very nature of theatre, a collaborative and sometimes very primitive art form. Through the course of these essays, it is clear that theatre not only survives some of the challenges of the day but even defines discussions, particularly political ones which are prohibited by an increasingly manipulated media. The essays, from a diverse group of theatre scholars, examine the mechanics of theatre, from space to sound to the use of technology, the role of women in creating theatre, the relationship between theatre and literary art forms, the politics of theatre, science and theatre, and the role of performance art. Through them all, it is clear that theatre, drama, and performance continue to speak in significant ways. ","“MAKING THE STAGE provides a unique purchase of drama's potentially disruptive cultural work. While it offers trenchant analyses of performance on earlier stages, its contributors speak with particular eloquence and force about a post-Beckettian theatre and world of disembodied voices, cyber-spaces, the threat of terrorism, and a new kind of theatrical spectator. This volume will be a 'must read' text for students of the contemporary theatre, as it has significant things to say about a range of sites and figures: from Beckett's 'Mouth' in NOT I to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, from Martin McDonagh's dark comedy to Caryl Churchill's continuing dissections of power.” Stephen Watt, Indiana University, Professor of English “Ann Hall's new collection, Making the Stage:  Essays on the Changing Concept of Theatre, Drama, and Performance, is a very welcome and timely volume. As Hall notes in her insightful introduction, the thirteen essays she includes, wide ranging though they are, all exemplify a very traditional emphasis on the text and its relationship to performance. Her collection I think a fine nudge of the critical pendulum away from the obsession with performance studies of the last twenty years or so, itself initially a correction of the previous generation's over-emphasis on the text-in-isolation. Hall's Making the Stage rediscovers that a play is indeed a literary genre as well as an exciting variant of ""performance entertainment,"" perhaps in the Brechtian sense. I particularly welcome all of the essays' suggestion, implicit or very explicit, that theater/drama, as a genre, at its best should challenge and disrupt the status quo, should be thought-provoking, should encourage radical change, in perspective, social understanding, political or aesthetic action. The essays collected here encourage our examination of responses to huge range of our theater, from the dramatized conduct literature of the 18th century, to 19th-century dramatic treatments of Milton in Spain, through early modern Irish drama's treatment of women, and into the modern, post-modern and achingly contemporary. While no reader will agree with all of the authors' conclusions and observations, all will profit from their very thoughtful, indeed provocative  examination of a genre challenged by current ""entertainment alternatives,"" but still vital, exciting and enriching.” Christopher C. Hudgins, Dean, College of Liberal Arts, University of Nevada, Las Vegas “Ann Hall's  book, MAKING THE STAGE, lives up to her promise in its Introduction that the book's emphasis is  on ""theatre's ability to challenge the status quo, speak for the unspoken, and enlighten the unenlightened.""  That is exactly what this fine collection of essays does.  The book's broad range covers everything from the use of voice in Beckett's plays to ways of bringing revolution to the stage in Irish Drama, to  theatrical responses to the current war on terror.  Bravo!  A rich collection which explores theatre's changing approaches and its enduring values.” Katherine Burkman, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Stella Hockenhull,Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger,Hardback,9781847187444,34.99,"Neo-Romantic Landscapes offers a reappraisal of the 1940s films of Powell and Pressburger focusing on their use of landscape. Questioning the established notion that the two film-makers, owing to their non-British personal roots, are located as un-British and ‘other’, Stella Hockenhull draws a correlation between the two media of film and painting to suggest otherwise. Emphasising the spiritual aspects of landscape and nature at a time when the experience and imagery of the war years generated a particular kind of ‘affect’ arising from the aftermath of destruction, she locates Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films in their historical and cultural context, notably Neo-Romanticism. By offering a close analysis of films such as A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going!, Black Narcissus and Gone to Earth she finds similar aesthetic qualities in a number of British landscape paintings executed contemporaneously. Drawing on press reviews for contemporary spectator response, Neo-Romantic Landscapes offers a redirection of Film Studies, foregrounding the aesthetic pleasures of cinema in excess of narrative plausibility, thus resituating Powell and Pressburger in the British cultural traditions of the visual arts. "," “This important reappraisal of the films of Powell and Pressburger locates their work within a wider context of British culture during the 1940s through the depiction of landscape. When read alongside Neo-Romantic paintings of the period, Hockenhull reveals not only their shared aesthetic approaches but also the 'structures of feeling' that these artists and filmmakers made available for audiences at this time. Through a combination of extensive historical research and detailed analysis, the author situates Powell and Pressburger more firmly within British cinema of the Forties. At the same time, her combination of an aesthetic approach and Reception Studies provides a useful methodology for film studies, one that is sensitive to aesthetics, affect and emotion. Consequently, the films of Powell and Pressburger have never seemed more accomplished, engaging and affecting nor more central to current debates on British cinema.” Dr Martin Shingler, Senior Lecturer in Radio & Film Studies, School of Arts, Design, Media & Culture The Media Centre, Sir Tom Cowie Campus at St.Peter's, University of Sunderland “This book argues that the 1940s films by Powell and Pressburger such as Canterbury Tales, Black Narcissus, I Know Where I’m Going!, and Gone to Earth are very much a product of the specific British cultural and historical situation of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The author takes issue with current and established views that locate Powell and Pressburger within a European tradition of art and film aesthetics, and instead Hockenhull provides some excellent empirical research concerning the manner in which their films can be seen significantly to share similar aesthetics and concerns with British Neo-Romantic painters. As a trained art historian and film scholar she provides revealing comparative close visual analyses (of films and paintings), and she also examines the films’ critical reception when first released to support her argument about a general cultural British Neo-Romantic sensibility during this period. This thought provoking book is of particular interest to British cultural and art historians.” Dr. Ulrike Sieglohr, Senior Lecturer in Film Television and Radio, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,Marcelline Block,Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema,Hardback,9781847186645,44.99,"Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze” to the “quantum gaze” in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes” to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.” David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…” ","“Feminist film theory presented in the lucid critical polyphony gathered with unerring critical instinct by Marcelline Block will insist upon a dynamic and mobile attitude facing the gaze.” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania “This volume, given the breadth of the editor’s choices, makes a splendid contribution to an array of feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural studies, media studies, postmodernism and postfeminism. The book may have the effect of inciting readers to reconsider stable methodologies and to conceptualize previously unthought-of ways to approach the gendered/cinematic gaze, performativity of gender and the reshaping of classic feminist film theory in the 21st century. This book lends its readers ‘new eyes’ with which to view canonical texts. The book, upon publication, may very well play a role as a significant scholarly resource; nor is this to forget its other role, that of a textbook for upper/lower-level university courses in departments of film, gender studies, cultural and media studies, among others. I fully recommend this book. I can even imagine I, myself, teaching parts of the book in my seminars on semiotics.” —Marshall Blonsky, PhD, New School University “The volume conjoins important new areas of study both in gender and medicine and in cultural studies of medicine. One of the great strengths of this volume is its historical as well as its disciplinary range from a consideration of Medieval art to contemporary television. The essays include treatments of the medical gaze in literary works as well as engagement with the literariness and visuality of medical publications (specifically, narrative, image, and language). The emphasis on gender gives this volume a tight, unifying focus. I am persuaded that it will have a broad audience among scholars across fields and disciplines and will be widely taught.” —Professor Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University “In light of current debates over healthcare, the volume could not be more timely. As a whole, it critiques the claim of the mimetic and objective, recognizes the instrumentality of representation, and examines definitions of normal and the stigmatization of disease and disfigurement. Individual essays work within interpretive models which puncture the myth of 'realism' and reveal reified realities; this critical context allows for interpreting the body as a contested site, delineates iconographic constructions which utilize strategies of containment, and shows the way in which narrative and visual representation often participates in the process of social training. These chapters underscore both the historical range and the geographical diversity of the volume. Each essay highlights the uniqueness of a specific historical moment, but also points towards the continuity of narrative and representational models and their interpretation across cultures.” —Carl Fisher, Professor of Comparative Literature, Chair of Department, Comparative World Literature and Classics California State University Long Beach “The topic of the book is timely, innovative and important. While research into medicine and narrative has been developing over the past fifteen or so years, it has retained a heavily sociological bias or taken the form of personal reflections. What is important about the volume is both its emphasis on issues of medicine in representation and its focus specifically on gender. A further innovative aspect of the volume is its interdisciplinary focus that includes American and European literature, the media, philosophy and, of course, cultural studies and medicine. There are not only articles on a broad range of texts from classic fiction to the infamous television program House MD and the popular film, Children of Men (2006), but the volume covers books from 1796 to the contemporary period. It will be a valuable contribution to the fields of medicine, narrative, literature and the media.” —E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Director, The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook Past President, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies “This volume will be invaluable in helping readers to look afresh at questions of gender, sexuality, and representation in the light of the methodological, aesthetic, and strategic shifts outlined here . . . Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema includes fresh, bold, and new voices alongside very well established scholars in the field, and will no doubt make an important and dynamic contribution to conversations about the role of feminism in contemporary film theory and history. I look forward to teaching sections of this book in a variety of courses, including my courses on film theory, women and film, and the Road Movie.” —Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies; Director, Program in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania “Marcelline Block has edited a compelling collection of essays which includes illuminating discussions of contemporary European and North American filmmakers in which issues pertaining to film theory and women’s studies intersect…This is a rich volume and important new book that recontextualizes key concepts by renowned feminist film theorists, and succeeds in reframing those crucial early insights within a new conceptual and historical configuration of feminist film theory in tune with recent cinematic production and historical and cultural realities.” —Gabriel Riera, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois, Chicago “I have read the manuscript of Marcelline Block’s edited collection Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema with great interest, and I am pleased to submit the following observations. I will say at the outset that the volume makes valuable, original, and often unique contributions to a remarkably wide array of feminist and cinematic fields. Its essays should be required reading for scholars, students, and general readers who care about cinema’s increasingly complex interactions with contemporary culture at large. The range and variety of the chapters constitute one of the book’s best assets, especially since their diversified contents rarely lose sight of the collection’s unifying concern(s) with the ways in which major issues of feminist and postfeminist theory are currently articulated by and through engagements with the politics, aesthetics, and practices of gender, sexuality, authorship, and representation in today’s moving-image media. A welcome byproduct of Marcelline Block’s approach is the rare (and badly needed) consideration given to filmmakers whose unconventional methods and techniques are chronically overlooked (even by many supposedly enlightened critics) precisely because they grow from a recognition that female/feminist filmmakers must conduct risky experiments with the medium if there is to be a chance of overturning the commercial-patriarchal cinema (a cinéma du papa in every sense) that has dominated and determined patterns of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception since the early days of cinema. I must add a note of appreciation for Marcelline Block’s introduction, which amounts to a concisely written summary of where feminist and postfeminist theory have recently been and are situated at the present time, and a richly suggestive view of where they are likely to be in the near future. Marcelline Block and her colleagues are in the forefront of the growing number of scholars who remember that Mulvey’s influential essay concludes with a call for using film theory as a political weapon capable of challenging, disputing, and ultimately overturning the engines of patriarchal bias that have operated for more than a century through the easily exploited conduits of mass-media visual expression. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema will play an important part in academic, sociopolitical, and film-cultural skirmishes for a long time to come.” —David Sterritt, PhD, School of the Arts, Columbia University, Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art; Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film, Long Island University Chair, National Society of Film Critics, Editorial Board, Quarterly Review of Film and Video; Distinguished Visiting Faculty, Goldring Arts Journalism, Syracuse University “Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema is a valuable resource for advanced scholarly research and is recommended for motivated upper-division undergraduate students (by motivated, I mean those undergraduates that are up for a challenge), graduate students and faculty. The scope of the collection's articles is quite vast, and thus will have a broad appeal while at the same time offering substantive content to researchers looking to integrate new material into specific course design or research.” —Eileen M. Angelini, Professor of French, Canisius College (Women in French Studies, vol. 18, 2010, 163-164) “This diverse collection of fourteen essays engages scholars in reflecting upon and (re)viewing cinema’s increasingly complex and far-reaching relationship with contemporary culture. . . . allows for inclusion of bracing readings of films and auteurs not readily considered mainstream, as well as reconsiderations of more well-known works. This collection would serve well primarily as a scholarly resource, and secondarily as a textbook for university courses at the graduate level. For those who teach courses with an emphasis on French cinema, culture, and recent history, Block’s efforts help to bring French cinema into an interdisciplinary focus. The films under discussion come from several countries and cultures, which broadens the examination of the feminist perspective in postwar cinema. The substantive, interdisciplinary, and internationalist approach is one of the collection’s major strengths.” —Eileen M. Angelini, Professor of French, Canisius College (NY), The French Review, vol. 84, no. 5, April 2011, p. 1047 “Ultimately, Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema represents a fresh and innovating addition to existing theories and methods of critical and aesthetical inquiry into women and cinema. The variety of theoretical models used by the contributors in this volume suggests that the feminist gaze today can and should be revisited from a de-centered, de-bierarchisized position. Perhaps, as some of the authors imply, a Deleuzian perspective which allows for multiple horizontal readings rather than a vertical, dual interpretive paradigm would be a more appropriate mode of investigation. By advocating a non-monolithic approach to feminist and postfeminist cinema, the book successfully ties together multiple points of view and effectively rewrites the discourse on the gaze using a new language without rejecting the old.” —Marzia Caporale, University of Scranton, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature, Volume 34, No. 2 (Summer 2010), p. 339 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-10-01,Bert Cardullo,"Five French Filmmakers: Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Rohmer; Essays and Interviews",Hardback,9781847189004,29.99,"Five French Filmmakers: Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Rohmer; Essays and Interviews is, as its title indicates, a collection of essays about, followed by interviews with, five of France’s major movie directors from the silent period (the early part of Jean Renoir’s career) through the New Wave and beyond (even to the present, in the films of Eric Rohmer). Most critics would agree that these five men are among the most important, if not the most important, in the history of French cinema—which means, of course, that they play a significant role in the history of world cinema as well. Moreover, there are echoes of Renoir’s work in François Truffaut’s, even as there are of Robert Bresson in Rohmer. The great Jacques Tati himself is evidence of Bresson’s dictum that “the soundtrack invented silence,” for he made all of his comedies—otherwise filled with silence—during the sound period. Five French Filmmakers, then, is the macrocosmic French cinema in microcosm. And all the more so because this book is introduced by the seminal French theorist and critic André Bazin (1918-1958), who in 1957 wrote an essay (translated here by me, for the very first time) titled “Fifteen Years of French Cinema,” which serendipitously spans the period from Renoir’s sound pictures all the way up to the start of the New Wave. Bazin naturally talks about all the important directors, in addition to Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, and Rohmer, working or starting their careers from 1942 to 1957, which is precisely why I have included his piece in—indeed, placed it at the start of—Five French Filmmakers. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-10-01,Bert Cardullo,Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theater Critics,Hardback,9781847188380,29.99,"Serious Dialogue:Interviews with American Theater Critics is a collection of interviews with, and among, America’s most notable theater critics: Robert Brustein, Stanley Kauffmann, Eric Bentley, Gordon Rogoff, and John Simon. Supplementing these interviews are an introductory critic’s apologia by the author, essays on the work of Stark Young and the recently deceased Richard Gilman, and a “guest appearance” by former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich, in addition to a bibliography of American theater criticism and a chronology of published criticism prior to the modern period. The book’s thesis is not only the generally accepted one that serious American drama has long been in decline on account of insurmountable competition from television and the cinema, among other technologies. The thesis of Serious Dialogue is also that the decline of American theater in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American theater criticism Not only is there is no book in English that collects interviews with the most noted American theater critics of the twentieth century; there is also no book, like Serious Dialogue, in which so vital, if sometimes vexing, a subject as the current state of American theater and drama is discussed at length. Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theater Critics is aimed, then, at those who would be interested in such a subject: the cultivated theater patron and the educated play-reader, as well as scholars, college students, and teachers of university-level courses in theater, drama, criticism, and comparative literature. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-10-01,Daniela De Pau and Georgina Torello,"Watching Pages, Reading Pictures: Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy",Hardback,9781847189172,44.99,"Italian cinema is internationally well-known for the ground-breaking experience of Neo-Realism, comedy ""Italian-Style,"" Spaghetti Westerns, and the horror movies of the seventies. However, what is rather unfamiliar to wider audiences is Italian cinema's crucial and enduring affair with literature. In fact, since the very beginning, literature has deeply influenced how Italian cinema has defined itself and grown. This book provides an empirical approach to this complex and fruitful relationship. The aim is to present discussions dealing with significant Italian film adaptations from literary materials which greatly exemplify the variety of styles, view-points, and attitudes produced by such an alliance, throughout the different periods. Among the adaptations discussed, are those that have followed trends and critical debates, making them, at times, rather problematic. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-10-01,Ágnes Pethő,"Words and Images on the Screen: Language, Literature and Moving Pictures",Hardback,9781847188434,39.99,"The screen has never been merely a canvas for the images to be displayed but also – to quote Jean-Luc Godard – “a blank page”, a surface for inscriptions and a “stage” for all kinds of linguistic occurrences be their audible or visual. Word did not come into the world of cinema at the time of the talkies but has been a primordial medial “companion” that has shaped the cinematic experience from its very beginnings. This volume offers a collection of essays that question the role of words and images in the context of moving pictures covering a wide area of their interconnectedness. How can we analyse literary adaptations? What is the role of adaptations in the evolution of specific national cinemas? In what way are written texts used in films? Is the model of the word and image relations used in silent films still applicable today? What major paradigms can be discerned within the multiplicity of ways Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema plays with words and images? Are these models of modernist or postmodern cinema reflected in films of other directors like R. W. Fassbinder? How do avant-garde works deal with the word and image debate? What are the connections of animation or computer games with verbal text and narrative? What is the phenomenon of jet-setting and how does it connect to the ideological implications of the relations between the culture of books and films? What happens when Hamlet is completely rewritten reflecting the ideology of late capitalism? What happens from the point of view of literariness or rejection of literariness when films are made vehicles of national propaganda? How do words get mediated through images? These are some of the questions addressed in the present volume by in-depth case studies of cinematic intermediality or more general surveys regarding cinema’s long lasting liaisons with language or literature. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-11-01,Bert Cardullo,"Brecht, Pinter, and the Avant-Garde: Three Essays on Modernist Drama",Hardback,9781847186805,29.99,"This is a collection of three long essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and non-realism or anti-realism (which can also be termed the experimental or non-representational) in drama, as this subject manifests itself in modern Europe and contemporary America, and at the moment when the theater returns to its non-realistic origins in ancient Greece—the very moment, paradoxically, when surface realism reaches its zenith on the Western stage. Brecht, Pinter, and the Avant-Garde: Three Essays on Modernist Drama treats not only the issue of realism versus anti-realism in theater from a practical as well as a theoretical point of view. It also treats a number of subjects related to this issue: the relationship of the non-real to the spiritual or the religious; the avant-garde, the rearguard, and the middle-to-advanced artistic ground in between claimed by such major figures as Bertolt Brecht and Harold Pinter; the military, scientific, and philosophical origins of theatrical avant-gardism; the deceptive ease, and consequent shallowness, of superficial or imitative realism; and the use of distancing devices or defamiliarization-effects in the Epic Theater of Brecht, as well as the use of similarly distancing comedy on the part of Pinter. In sum, Brecht, Pinter, and the Avant-Garde treats the subject of realism and non-realism from the point of view of the theater’s ability to create not only the illusion of reality, but also the reality of illusion onstage (the reality, that is, of the unreal, or of the illusion-making capacity, illusion-projecting essence, or illusion-embracing tendency of the human mind)—as well as something in between the two. Moreover, there are no single-authored performing-arts books in English that feature the comparative, in-depth perspective of this book, in which so vital, if sometimes vexing, a subject as realistic versus non-realistic theater is discussed in the context of Euro-American drama. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-11-01,Kenneth R. Morefield ,Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-0009-9,34.99,"""Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema"" is a fascinating introduction to spiritual aspects in the works of some of the greatest filmmakers in the world, like Bergman, Dreyer and Tarkovsky, Avant Garde director Pedro Costa and Hollywood's golden boy Guillermo del Toro. It covers directors from around the world and shows diverse manifestations of spirituality in film; everything from how camera movements can imply spirituality to specific religions, like Islam and Christianity. ""Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema"" is a welcome addition to a growing library on religion and film. —Thorkell Ottarson ""The essayists in Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema offer provocative studies of the often uneasy relationship that exists between religion and film, faith and reason. They never shy away from their critical burden, challenging readers to delve deeply and think more forcefully about the ethics and values that shape our culture—and our lives. Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema dares us to reconsider what it means to be whole—and holy—across the great history of film. It is a spiritual and critical journey of the highest magnitude."" —Dr. Kenneth Womack, Chair of the English Department, Penn State University at Altoona ""Not many works of art would withstand the rigorous examination of the kind in this collection, but Kenneth Morefield and his contributors have chosen well. They've chosen filmmakers whose work not only withstands but seems to grow under the bright light of careful consideration. I'm not familiar with all of them, which makes the collection a useful map to the currents that run below their surfaces, but I also found new ways to appreciate Pedro Costa and the Dardenne brothers whose films I've admired, even loved, but never thought about in quite this way. Reading the essays together, I discovered that this group of filmmakers, while distinct in their beliefs, approaches, and aesthetics, are all striving to reawaken our senses, and by capturing something concrete they're looking for something invisible. That they've found so many ways to do this—from Del Toro's physically-rooted fantasy to Costa's material world—proves that cinema may not be dead just yet, even with the twentieth century in the rear view mirror."" —Rob Davis, chief film critic of Paste Magazine; co-founder of Daily Plastic (www.dailyplastic.com). ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Bert Cardullo,"Cinematic Illusions: Realism, Subjectivity, and the Avant-Garde",Paperback,978-1-4438-0024-2,14.99,"Cinematic Illusions: Realism, Subjectivity, and the Avant-Garde"" is a collection of twelve essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and anti-realism (the experimental or non-representational) in film. The book treats not only the issue of realism versus anti-realism in the cinema, but also a number of subjects related to this issue: sex; violence; the avant-garde; subjective response versus objective creation; and the New American Cinema versus Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. In sum, Cinematic Illusions treats the subject of illusion from the point of view of the cinema’s unsurpassed ability to create not only the illusion of reality, but also the reality of illusion on the silver screen. There are a number of books that treat this subject from an abstract or theoretical point of view. The virtue of ""Cinematic Illusions"" is that it treats the subject in actual filmic practice and in highly readable yet at the same time subtly expressive prose. In combination with the subjects listed above, moreover, this collection of essays treats such major film directors as Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni--each of whom, in his own way, confronted the question of what constitutes realism in the cinema. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Bert Cardullo,"Five French Filmmakers: Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Rohmer; Essays and Interviews",Paperback,978-1-4438-0029-7,14.99,"Five French Filmmakers: Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Rohmer; Essays and Interviews is, as its title indicates, a collection of essays about, followed by interviews with, five of France’s major movie directors from the silent period (the early part of Jean Renoir’s career) through the New Wave and beyond (even to the present, in the films of Eric Rohmer). Most critics would agree that these five men are among the most important, if not the most important, in the history of French cinema—which means, of course, that they play a significant role in the history of world cinema as well. Moreover, there are echoes of Renoir’s work in François Truffaut’s, even as there are of Robert Bresson in Rohmer. The great Jacques Tati himself is evidence of Bresson’s dictum that “the soundtrack invented silence,” for he made all of his comedies—otherwise filled with silence—during the sound period. Five French Filmmakers, then, is the macrocosmic French cinema in microcosm. And all the more so because this book is introduced by the seminal French theorist and critic André Bazin (1918-1958), who in 1957 wrote an essay (translated here by me, for the very first time) titled “Fifteen Years of French Cinema,” which serendipitously spans the period from Renoir’s sound pictures all the way up to the start of the New Wave. Bazin naturally talks about all the important directors, in addition to Renoir, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, and Rohmer, working or starting their careers from 1942 to 1957, which is precisely why I have included his piece in—indeed, placed it at the start of—Five French Filmmakers. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Bert Cardullo,"Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiraostami, and Zhang Yimou; Essays and Interviews",Paperback,978-1-4438-0025-9,14.99," Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, and Zhang Yimou is a collection of interviews with, and essays about, the four filmmakers who introduced the cinema of their respective countries to the West: Kurosawa (Japan) and Ray (India), in the 1950s; Kiarostami (Iran) and Zhang (China), in the 1980s. Kurosawa and Ray were post-World War II phenomena, as the new breed of American cinephiles demanded more contact with Asian cultures of which they had known little until the 1940s. Kiarostami and Zhang, for their part, are both post-revolutionary filmmakers whose films have helpfully introduced Americans to two Eastern cultures with which the American government has long had—and continues to have—a problematic relationship. As a whole, then, Out of Asia documents an alternative to Western brands of cinema even as these four “foreign” directors, with the possible exception of Kiarostami, integrate Western forms, styles, and genres into their own native traditions. As such, these artists could be said to represent a global filmmaking perspective that now, more than ever, this world—and the American nation—can use. Each of the interviews in this volume is accompanied by an overview of the director’s career or an essay on representative films by him. In addition, Out of Asia is preceded by a contextualizing introduction; it is followed by filmographies, a bibliography, and an index; and the book is interspersed with photographs of the four directors in question or stills from their films. There are books devoted to individual filmmakers like Kurosawa, Ray, Kiarostami, and Zhang, but, until Out of Asia, there has not been one that treats representatives of four national cinemas from their own point of view, as well as from an international perspective. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Bert Cardullo,"The Movies on my Mind: Selected Criticism, 2002-2007",Paperback,978-1-4438-0028-0,16.99,"The main purpose of The Movies on My Mind: Collected Criticism, 2002-2007 is to stake out territory for a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, the author offers close readings of individual films that go beyond simple plot summaries and vague impressions about acting (the province of the newspaper review), on the one hand, yet that pull up short of arid hermetic academic discourse (the province of the scholarly monograph), on the other hand. With elegance, clarity, and rigor, the author tries ever to demonstrate that the cinema means as well as shows, and his ultimate aim is to explain how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant humanistic goals. Thus, in addition to chronicling the vitality and richness of international film art, The Movies on My Mind aims to facilitate its understanding and appreciation. To wit, the reviews—or, better, chronicles—contained in The Movies on My Mind are acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic senses of those words; they are neither theoretical musings nor pedantic tracts. As such, this book can be considered a call for the return of practical criticism as the best way to understand and appreciate the work of cinematic artists. These include, in the present collection, directors from such countries as France, England, the United States, Austria, Iran, Italy, Israel, Senegal, Afghanistan, Sweden, Finland, Columbia, (post-Soviet) Georgia, Japan, Argentina, South Korea, and Belgium. Contemporary films like The Passion of the Christ, The Pianist, The Hours, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are treated, as well as classics like Winter Light, La Strada, To Be or Not to Be, and How I Won the War. These review-essays themselves are supplemented by a bibliography of related criticism, directors’ filmographies, individual film credits, and a thoroughgoing index. There are other books on international, art-house cinema, but there are few that feature the international or global perspective of The Movies on My Mind. It is to other collections of film criticism that this book should be compared, however, since its real strength is critical. And there aren’t very many recent books that provide this kind of close analysis of contemporary movies together with a number of classics, and of some important directorial and critical careers as well. The Movies on My Mind thus offers a refreshing, readable alternative to both the facile, stargazing monographs that one can find in any chain bookstore and the arcane academic publications that deal with phenomenology, historiography, the politics of gender, race, and class, and the cognitive dissection of film style and technique. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-01-01,Mark Heberle,"Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film and Art",Hardback,978-1-4438-0123-2,49.99,"Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film and Art brings together essays on literature, film and media, representational art, and music of the Vietnam War that were generated by a three-day conference in Honolulu during Veterans Week 2005. This large and extensive volume, the first collection of Vietnam War criticism published since the 1990s, reflects significant cultural and historical changes since then, including U.S.-Vietnamese cultural transactions in the wake of political reconciliation and the Vietnamese diaspora; popular commodification and memorialization of the war in America; and renascent American imperialism. Contributors include well-established and well-published writers and critics like Philip Beidler, Cathey Calloway, Lorrie Goldensohn, Wayne Karlin, Andrew Lam, Jerry Lembcke, Tim O’Brien, John S. Schafer, and Alex Vernon as well as emerging Vietnam scholars and critics. Among other contributions, the volume provides important quasi-bibliographical essays on canonical American and Vietnamese literature and film, African American Vietnam war narratives, Chicano fiction and poetry, and American Vietnam war art music as well as essays on such subjects as real and digital war memorials, Vietnamese popular war songs, and Vietnamization of the Gulf War. Teachers, scholars, and the general public will find Thirty Years After a valuable guide to ongoing critical discussion of the most important event in American history between 1945 and 9/11. ""I highly recommend this book. Although it is almost a cliche say the Vietnam War has left deep and lingering scars on American society-Thirty Years underscores the still traumatic cultural legacy of this conflict. Attuned to the divergent voices and genres of representation--Thirty Years is an indispensable work, not only for literary scholars, but for anyone seeking to understand the enduring impact of the Vietnam War. An impressive work, Mark Herbele is commended for organizing such an insightful and gracefully written set of essays."" —G. Kurt Piehler, author of Remembering War the American Way. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-02-01,Robert J. Andreach,John Guare’s Theatre: The Art of Connecting,Hardback,978-1-4438-0179-9,34.99,"From the 1960s to the present day, John Guare’s plays have ranged from one-act to cyclic, realistic to surrealistic, naturalistic to experimental, and tragic to comic dramas. This study’s approach to the cornucopia the playwright himself provided when in an interview he gave a fundamental aesthetic principle of his craft. Like a person—and Guare’s plays develop the personal as well as the artistic self—a play must be grounded in reality; only then can it soar. The ground is traditional theatre with characters, no matter how larger than life they can be, and plot, no matter how illogical it can be. The soaring is in interrupting the action with monological narratives and musical interludes, bringing characters back from the dead, and having the action take hairpin turns into a mixture of genres and styles, modes and tones. In verbal and visual images, the flight invokes works by authors as varied as Aeschylus and Whitman, Dante and Feydeau, Verdi and Romberg. Soaring from ground to new ground, the theatre creates the transmission of the American heritage in Lake Hollywood, an idealism corrupted by a fraudulent American Dream in Lydie Breeze, and the recovery of the past in A Few Stout Individuals. As Guare said about his plays: they “interconnect.” ","""Taking Guare at his word that his plays interconnect, Andreach, a scholar of modern American theater, seeks a thread that weaves through hide wide ranging drama since the 1960s. He treats the plays in groups, beginning with his introduction focused on the early one-act plays."" 2010 Book News Inc. Portland ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,Kenneth Nally,"""Celebrating Confusion"": The Theatre of Frank McGuinness",Hardback,978-1-4438-0335-9,44.99,"Though widely lauded as one of the most creative and challenging forces in Irish theatre Frank McGuinness’s plays have often met with a tempestuous reception. This new work details the significance of key productions of his plays in the context of Ireland’s culture and society. Charting McGuinness’s development as a dramatist from The Factory Girls through to Gates of Gold it combines cultural, political and theatrical analysis to position McGuinness as the most significant Irish playwright of his generation. Textual analysis supports considerations of theatrical performance to show how visual art, stagecraft, sculpture and song are central to our understanding of McGuinness’s theatre. Drawing forth the range of sexual, familial and national identities found in McGuinness’s work this book shows the significance of symbols in theatre that often seeks to confuse the simplicities of absolutes in order to show the complexities of difference. Wide-ranging, theoretically astute and written in a lucid and engaging style, Celebrating Confusion will appeal to all readers who are interested in Irish Theatre and its intersection with the politics and culture of contemporary Ireland. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,Isabelle le Corff and Estelle Epinoux,Cinemas of Ireland,Hardback,978-1-4438-0240-6,39.99,"Cinemas of Ireland is a collection of fourteen essays which provide numerous approaches to the new Irish cinemascape from both an Irish and a European perspective. Highlighting the works of European scholars in Irish studies, it features a variety of noteworthy critical papers that explore the evolution of contemporary Irish cinema in an era of globalisation. The collection also stresses the rich interdisciplinary nature of Irish film studies, ranging from theoretical studies, gender studies, to political and historical studies. The list of films analysed includes among others Adam and Paul (2004), The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), Garage (2007), The Brave One (2007). This collective volume is aimed at all established and emerging scholars who work on Irish cinema and at all the readers who are interested in discovering contemporary Irish cinema in its evolution and in the issues it tackles. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,"Graeme Watson, Barbara Gabriella Renzi, Elisabetta Viggiani and Máiréad Collins",Friends and Foes Volume I: Friendship and Conflict in Philosophy and the Arts,Hardback,978-1-4438-0332-8,34.99,"The product of an international, multi-disciplinary conference at Queen’s University Belfast, the two-volume Friends and Foes series offers an illuminating investigation of the relationship between friendship and conflict by established and emerging scholars. In this first volume, which collects together philosophical and cultural essays on the topic, the authors raise and tackle some of the most pertinent issues central to the understanding, and making, of friendship. What constitutes friendship? What challenges, duties and pleasures does friendship entail? The ambiguity of friendship is a recurring theme in the book, and Mark Vernon’s essay on the philosophical history of thinking about friendship’s ambiguity provides the perfect point of entry for discussion of the compelling literary and theatrical representations which follow, in the work of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Gregory Burke, and Edgar Allan Poe. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,Maite Escudero-Alías,Long Live the King: A Genealogy of Performative Genders,Hardback,978-1-4438-0216-1,39.99,"Masculinity is no longer a monolithic category, if ever it was. Long Live the King is a solid piece of scholarship that explores in depth the drag king phenomenon as well as key theoretical texts by feminist, postcolonial and cultural thinkers. Maite Escudero-Alías delves into drag king culture and highlights its relevance for the study of the relationship between gender, sex, race and sexuality. Introduced by a well-informed theoretical chapter that traces the roots of queer theory, Long Live the King provides the reader with a rigorous textual and cultural examination of drag kings’ most innovative performances of masculinity in the USA and the UK. These chapters prove groundbreaking in their acute analyses of drag kings’ acts in different media, ranging from still images to live performances, documentaries, mainstream television series and literature. Theory and analysis blend perfectly and Escudero-Alías’s main contention in this research – the ambivalent nature of drag kings’ performances of masculinity – is conducted convincingly. This book constitutes an invaluable contribution to the field of gender studies and a fair assessment of the political impact of minority artistic practices in contemporary culture. ","“Objective without being objectifying, Long Live the King is the first intensive analysis of Drag Kingdom written by a self-admitted 'outsider.' The insights that Escudero-Alías offers into this world of performative masculinities are funneled through the lens of Butlerian feminism, yet tempered by a frank admiration for the Kings and their work. This book offers a unique perspective that complements extant work on Drag Kings and is a must-read for anyone interested in gender performance or female masculinities.” - Sara E. Cooper, Chair, Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Expression Discussion Group, MLA, Associate Professor of Spanish and Multicultural & Gender Studies, California State University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,"Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman",Scottish Cinema Now,Hardback,978-1-4438-0331-1,39.99,"Cinema from Scotland has attained an unprecedented international profile in the decade or so since Shallow Grave (1995) and Trainspotting (1996) impinged on the consciousness of audiences and critics around the world. Scottish Cinema Now is the first collection of essays to examine in depth the new films and filmmakers that have emerged from Scotland over the last ten years. With contributions from both established names and new voices in British Cinema Studies, the volume combines detailed textual analysis with discussion of industrial issues, scholarship on new movies with historical investigation of unjustly forgotten figures and film from Scotland’s cinematic past, and a focus on international as well as indigenous images of Scottishness. Responding to the ways in recent Scottish filmmaking has transformed the country’s cinematic landscape, Scottish Cinema Now reexamines established critical agendas and sets new ones for the study of Scotland’s relationship with the moving image in the twenty-first century. ","""A passionate and informed collection of essays that metes out tough love to the past and present of Scottish cinema. Scottish Cinema Now picks up on - and sometimes picks on - old arguments about the culture, industry and financing of Scottish film, and develops new ones. The new insights are refreshingly revisionist and break new ground in a number of areas: video art, international marketing, gender, kailyard, and the rhetoric and legacy of New Scottish Cinema. No-one who is teaching or studying Scottish film or culture can ignore this book. Nor should filmmakers or politicians, as it has quite a policy kick."" Mark Cousins, Film Critic ""Basically Scotish Cinema Now is a state of the cinematic nation book, a slim volume that brings together some of the best writers who have something to say about Scotish film and the strengths and weaknesses it possesses and why these strengths and weaknesses happen to be there"" Tony Mckibbin ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-04-01,Bert Cardullo,After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews,Hardback,978-1-4438-0358-8,34.99,"The term “neorealism” was first applied by the critic Antonio Pietrangeli to Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), and the style came to fruition in the mid-to-late forties in such films of Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica as Rome, Open City (1945), Shoeshine (1946), Paisan (1947), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and The Earth Trembles (1948). These pictures reacted not only against the banality that had long been the dominant mode of Italian cinema, but also against prevailing socio-economic conditions in Italy. With minimal resources, the neorealist filmmakers worked in real locations using local people as well as professional actors; they improvised their scripts, as need be, on site; and their films conveyed a powerful sense of the plight of ordinary individuals oppressed by political circumstances beyond their control. Thus Italian neorealism was the first postwar cinema to liberate filmmaking from the artificial confines of the studio and, by extension, from the Hollywood-originated studio system. But neorealism was the expression of an entire moral or ethical philosophy, as well, and not simply just another new cinematic style. After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films is an attempt, through essays and interviews, to chronicle what happened to neorealism after the disappearance of the forces that produced it—World War II, the resistance, and liberation, followed by the postwar reconstruction of a morally, politically, and economically devastated society. In fact, neorealism did not disappear: it changed its form but not its profoundly humanistic concerns, depending on the filmmaker and the film. Neorealistic stylistic and thematic principles have been perpetuated not only by the first generation of directors who succeeded latter-day neorealists like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, but also by the second generation of auteurs to succeed these two artists. Among members of that first generation we may count Ermanno Olmi, with his compassionate studies of working-class life like Il Posto (1961), and Francesco Rosi, with his vigorous attacks on the abuse of power such as Salvatore Giuliano (1961). They are joined, among others, by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone, 1961), Vittorio De Seta (Banditi a Orgosolo, 1961), Marco Bellocchio (I pugni in tasca, 1965), and the Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo (Padre Padrone, 1977). And these filmmakers themselves have been followed by Gianni Amelio (Stolen Children, 1990), Nanni Moretti (The Mass Is Ended, 1988), Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), and Maurizio Nichetti (The Icicle Thief, 1989). From this diverse group, After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films includes interviews with, and essays about, Olmi, Pasolini, Amelio, and Moretti, with pieces as well on such seminal figures as Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni. Also included are a long, contextualizing intrroduction, filmographies of the directors treated in this book, and bibliographies of books about them as well as about Italian cinema in general. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-04-01,Deniz Bayrakdar Assistant Editors: Aslı Kotaman and Ahu Samav Uğursoy ,Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and The New Europe,Hardback,978-1-4438-0343-4,44.99,"This volume presents varied approaches concerning the relation between cinema and politics which focus on policies, eras, countries, mainstream and art cinema productions, transnational examples, changing narratives and identities.  Both cinema and politics have actors and directors for their scenes, and in this sense their discourses intermingle. The performances of the “actors/actresses” in both arenas attract particular attention. The actors, directors, and producers with ‘hyphenated/creolised/hybrid identities’ such as German-Turks, directors of Balkan cinema, or Italian filmmakers of Turkish origin give a wide and refreshing perspective to the discussion of Europe in the media. What these ‘mediated identities’ represent goes beyond the limits of the old Europe, towards the different sensitivity of the New Europe. Scholars and advanced students of Film Studies, European Studies, Identity Politics, Migration / Emigration and Gender Studies will find this volume of integral importance to their work. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-04-01,Agnieszka Rasmus and Magdalena Cieślak,Images of the City,Hardback,978-1-4438-0452-3,44.99,"Images of the City takes the reader on a fascinating journey through urban landscapes across centuries, literary periods, media, genres and borders. 27 essays gathered from Poland, UK, Romania, Italy, Hungary, and Portugal by researchers representing different academic environments and fields of speciality offer a truly interdisciplinary perspective on the issue of understanding, representing, and interpreting the city. In this respect, the volume complements other anthologies which discuss urban space without limiting itself to one unique theoretical perspective. Its neat division into chronological and thematic sections makes for easy yet informative and inclusive reading, encouraging cross-referencing and challenging interests and tastes of a wide array of readers. Images of the City provides essential reading for cityphiles everywhere. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-05-01,Peter Wuss,"Cinematic Narration and its Psychological Impact: Functions of Cognition, Emotion and Play",Hardback,978-1-4438-0527-8,44.99,"Film provides experience potential. Contemporary cognitive psychology gives the opportunity to define this impact on the film spectators’ mind in regard to different aspects of cognition, imagination and emotion. Proceeding from these positions, this book considers a number of practical issues of cinematic narration with which filmmakers, theorists and cineastes are frequently confronted: What is storytelling, and how may we objectify the regularities to be found at work in different modes of narration in the fiction film, among them structural principles of “art-cinema” which are often experienced on a level beneath conscious reception? What is the role of the element of conflict in the process of narration, and what are the effects that the representation of conflict situations on the screen has on the viewers’ emotions? How can we define “cinematic tension” and also “suspense”, and how does each influence the disposition of the audience? What constitutes a “reality-effect” in fiction films, and how can it vary in different modes of storytelling? How are a given protagonists’ dreams, fantasies and play behaviour integrated both into the course of narrative events and into the development of the spectator’s imageries and ideas? And finally: How do film genres work on a psychological level? Providing a theoretical framework for further empirical research, the book outlines a differentiated model for analysing key devices of cinematic narration in view of their impact on the spectators’ mind. ","""Peter Wuss leads readers on an adventure in cinematic storytelling through Russian formalism, German aesthetics, developmental psychology, semiotics, and more, drawing along the way upon his experience at the Moscow Film Institute VGIK and the Babelsberg studios. His endorsement of the link between psychology and film studies found in contemporary Cognitive Film Theory is of great consequence for students of film and psychology the world over."" — Joseph Anderson, author of The Reality of Illusion. “Peter Wuss’s CINEMATIC NARRATION AND ITS PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT: FUNCTIONS OF COGNITION, EMOTION AND PLAY is a comprehensive and valuable discussion of a wide range of theoretical issues in film theory such as narrative form and function, the role of emotions in film, and genre theory. The book makes use of an unusual rich variety of theoretical methods and approaches, with cognitive psychology and film theory as the center piece. The book illustrates the theoretical insights with salient in depth analyses of films.” — Torben Grodal, Professor in Film Studies at the University of Copenhagen. ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-05-01,"Michelle MacArthur, Lydia Wilkinson and Keren Zaiontz",Performing Adaptations: Essays and Conversations on the Theory and Practice of Adaptation,Hardback,978-1-4438-0512-4,39.99,"Performing Adaptations: Conversations and Essays on the Theory and Practice of Adaptation brings together scholars and artists from across North America and the United Kingdom to contribute to the growing discourse on adaptation in the arts. An ideal text for students of theatre, drama, and performance studies, this volume offers a ground-breaking set of essays, interviews, and artistic reflections that assess adaptation from the perspective of live performance, an aspect of the field that has been under-explored until now. The diverse authors and interview subjects in this anthology take a variety of approaches to both creating and analyzing adaptations, demonstrating the form’s suitability for testing and speaking back to dominant models of creation, production, and analysis. Featuring articles by pioneering adaptation scholar Linda Hutcheon and critically acclaimed writer and critic George Elliott Clarke, Performing Adaptations advances the field of adaptation studies in new and exciting ways. The authors in Performing Adaptations do not comprise a comprehensive view of adaptation studies, but represent a collection of “gutsy” voices that use adaptation to test, and speak back to dominant models of creation, production, and analysis. Some of these perspectives include a group of artists from the African Diaspora, Europe, and Canada (the AfriCan Theatre Ensemble); the voice of Chinese-Canadian playwright, Marjorie Chan; the innovative storytelling of Beth Watkins, and her adaptation of letters written by transgendered student activist, Jesse Carr; the views of vanguard Canadian queer filmmaker, John Greyson; and African-Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, George Elliott Clarke. Their adaptation of sources to other genres, mediums, and cultural contexts represent the act of a radical, dialogical reading, writ large. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-05-01,Virginia Apperson and John Beebe,The Presence of the Feminine in Film,Paperback,978-1-4438-0513-1,19.99,"This pioneering book introduces a largely unremarked dimension of film, the “feminine,” which cannot be reduced to women’s experience, or to men’s projections onto women. The Presence of the Feminine in Film gives body to that often rather loosely formulated Jungian conception, the “feminine aspect of psyche,” by noticing what “feminine” turns out to mean in particular cinematic contexts. Spanning seven decades—from Pride and Prejudice, Notorious, and Letter from an Unknown Woman to Monsoon Wedding, Brokeback Mountain, and The Lives of Others—the movies selected for particular study here make it clear that the feminine is at home in the movies, and that when she appears, it is to appeal to our sensibilities as well as to our senses. This is a book that will enhance the appreciation of film as a depth psychological medium. ","Jungians and film criticism are made for each other. There is so much here that is illuminating--it completely changed my way of looking at movies, not only in applying the Jungian vocabulary to a medium in need of one, but also because of the brilliant insights into the many ways auteur filmmakers have found to depict the feminine, from Alfred Hitchcock’s preoccupation with the challenged goddesses in Notorious, Vertigo, and Marnie, to Max Ophuls’ evocation of the all-but-forgotten anima in Letter from an Unknown Woman, to contemporary celebrations of her presence in Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. John Beebe's classic essay on the Anima in Film opened all this up to me, but each essay added to my understanding of the way archetypes are deployed in all movies. Diane Johnson, author of The Shadow Knows, Le Divorce, and other novels and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Virginia Apperson’s and John Beebe's fascinating book weaves together cinematic, theoretical and psychoanalytic discourses in demonstrating the complex ways that images of women in movies become images of a more pervasive cultural feminine that is deeply internalized in all of us. Rich in psychological insights and perceptive analyses, The Presence of the Feminine in Film carries the implications of cinematic representations into the realms of gender and cultural studies, sexuality and the unconscious. Whitney Chadwick, author of Women, Art, and Society ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,R. Victoria Arana,“Black” British Aesthetics Today,Paperback,978-1-4438-0601-5,19.99,"“Black” British Aesthetics Today is a collection of twenty-four exciting critical and theoretical essays exploring current thinking about the hottest artistic, literary, and critical works now being produced by “black” Britons. This book features a number of chapters by the avant-garde “black” British novelists, poets, and artists themselves. It includes, for instance, aesthetic manifestos by Diran Adebayo, Anthony Joseph, Roshini Kempadoo, Sheree Mack, Valerie Mason-John, and SuAndi as well as key essays by globally renowned critics, including Amna Malik, Kobena Mercer, Lauri Ramey, Roy Sommer, and many others. As a compendium, this book represents a powerfully fresh intellectual current of thought. It provides readers with important insights into contemporary “black” aesthetics, and it includes an array of important clarifications initially voiced at the groundbreaking international symposium that took place on April 8, 2006, at Howard University in Washington, D.C., by outstanding new scholars in this burgeoning field of study: e.g., Kevin Etienne-Cummings, Valerie Kaneko Lucas, Michael McMillan, Magdalena Maczynska, Courtney Martin, Jude Okpala, Deirdre Osborne, Koye Oyedeji, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Sandra Ponzanesi, Andrene M. Taylor, Samera Owusu Tutu, and Tracey Walters. The authors contextualise contemporary “black” British aesthetics in relation to the African, African American, and Postcolonial aesthetic traditions; they explore an exciting array of critical theories, trends of feeling, and lively aesthetic movements thriving today in “black” Britain; and they examine and assess embodied aesthetics at play in a wide range of specific works by today’s most brilliant “black” British novelists, poets, photographers, live performance artists, dramatists, architects, musicians, graphic artists, and cinematographers. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,Craig N. Owens,Pinter Et Cetera,Hardback,978-1-4438-0594-0,39.99,"PINTER ET CETERA, edited by Craig N. Owens, is among the first volumes published since playwright Harold Pinter's death to account for the many ways his poems, plays, fiction, screenwriting, and public statements have have influenced the creative work of artists and writers worldwide. It collects nine essays by nine scholars from five nations, each approaching Pinter's work from a different perspective. Together, these essays offer a compelling argument for thinking of Pinter not merely as a unique writer whose individual genius has introduced the world to a particular aesthetic, but more importantly, as an artist working within numerous traditions, influencing and influenced by the work of painters, installation artists, film directors, photographers, poets and, of course, theatre-makers. PINTER ET CETERA is a bold step toward expanding our understanding of Pinter and establishing its importance beyond the absurdist stage. Contributors include Judith Roof, Ubiratan Paiva de Oliveira, Kyounghye Kwon, Mark Taylor-Batty, Michael Stuart Lynch, Jeanne Colleran, Andrew Wyllie, Christopher Wixson, and Lance Norman. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdoğan,Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context,Paperback,978-1-4438-0592-6,19.99,"Continuity and change are the two major trends that mark European film and media vistas today. While continuity is the result of more than a century of European film and media tradition, change is brought about by technological convergence, the evolution of globalization and commercial markets and of artistic and aesthetic norms, and the ever-expanding cultural borders of Europe. Bringing together eighteen research-based analyses on topics as diverse as Europe itself, Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context presents various accounts of filmic and televisual media, text and form, mediated politics, media policy, globalization, diasporic media, multiculturalism and more. The chapters are grouped into three main sections: Identities, Borders, Industries; Migration, Space, Transnationality; and Telling Stories: Medium, Form, Message and Beyond. Employing film studies, critical social theory and cultural studies and drawing upon technological, spatial, political economic, sociological and anthropological approaches, the authors present multidimensional and multi-faceted depictions of the historical and contemporary factors that have shaped, and continue to shape, film and media in Europe. “Ambitious in both its intellectual and geographical scope, this volume provides us with an innovative and original understanding of what is happening in the new and rapidly changing European cinema scene – a very welcome intervention in an important cultural agenda.” ¬¬Kevin Robins, City University, London “Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdogan have edited an excellent book on film and media landscapes in the ""new"" Europe of the early twenty-first century. Incorporating eighteen individual chapters in three parts, the book re-examines what ""European"" media and cinema means during a period in which the geographical and cultural boundaries of ""Europe"" are still shifting, the media themselves are deeply influenced by the digital revolution, and audiences for ""film"" are constantly re-defining themselves. The book itself offers fresh perceptions across a range of different fields and should be of interest to all those fascinated by current trends in both film and media.” Melvyn Stokes, University College London ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,Bert Cardullo,The Ghost of Cinema Past: Contemporary Reflections on Classic Film Art,Hardback,978-1-4438-0954-2,39.99,"The main purpose of The Ghost of Cinema Past: Contemporary Reflections on Classic Film Art is to reinvestigate and reevaluate classic films, films of yesterday, from the point of view of today, taking into account such factors as time, memory, history, and subjectivity; perspective, context, universality, and objectivity. Another purpose of this book is to stake out territory for a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, the author offers close readings of classic films—either individually or in groups—which go beyond simple plot summaries and vague impressions about acting (the province of the newspaper review), on the one hand, yet that pull up short of hermetic, oracular pronouncements (the province of the academic monograph), on the other hand. The re-viewings contained in The Ghost of Cinema Past are thus acts of analysis and interpretation in the humanistic senses of those words; they are neither theoretical musings nor pedantic tracts. In these essays, the author treats classics like Winter Light, Forbidden Games, L’avventura, and Some Like It Hot; and the directors he discusses—Fellini, Bergman, Renoir, Kurosawa, Coppola—are from such countries as France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, India, the United States, and Japan. These pieces are supplemented by an introductory rationale for the “necessity” of film, as well as by a bibliography of related criticism and a thoroughgoing index. There are of course other books on international art-house cinema, but there are few that feature the global perspective of The Ghost of Cinema Past. It is to other collections of film criticism that this book should be compared, however, since its real strength is critical. And there aren’t very many recent books that provide this kind of close examination of classic films and of some important directorial careers as well. The Ghost of Cinema Past thus offers a refreshing alternative to both the facile, stargazing monographs that one can find in any chain bookstore and the arcane academic publications that deal with phenomenology, historiography, the politics of gender, race, and class, and the cognitive dissection of film style and technique. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Ulrike Garde and Anne-Rose Meyer,"Belonging and Exclusion: Case Studies in Recent Australian and German Literature, Film and Theatre",Hardback,978-1-4438-1000-5,39.99,"The essays collected in this volume explore a wide range of aesthetic, philosophical and generic applications of the concepts of belonging and exclusion in the context of migration. Organised in two sections, “Performing belonging” and “Narrating otherness”, this original study represents a timely interdisciplinary approach to a topic of great contemporary and future interest. It is the first cross-cultural analysis of how belonging and exclusion are created and represented in literature, film and theatre against the background of the different historical and present conditions of migration and ‘multiculturalism’ in Australia and Germany. Academics from Australia and Germany, two countries described by some as opposite poles on the migration spectrum, uncover new correlations between different cultures and genres. The focus on artistic works offers snapshots, seldom available in everyday life, of belonging and exclusion in process. Written with both academics and students in mind, the essays discuss belonging and exclusion across a variety of genres, including the Bildungsroman, terrorism novel, children’s literature, and different kinds of film, cabaret and theatre. Among the topical issues addressed are borders, bodies, education, exile, generations of migrants, globalisation, identity, language, memory, narrative strategies, photography, representation, lieux de mémoire, terrorism and transculturalism. Given the dominance of socio-political and anthropological studies of belonging and exclusion, this cross-cultural study with its emphasis on aesthetics represents a unique approach and is of topical concern to scholars in the humanities. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Bert Cardullo,Bresson and Others: Spiritual Style in the Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-0992-4,39.99,"A number of writers have attempted to capture Robert Bresson’s style as well as his substance with such terms as “minimalist,” “austere,” ""ascetic,"" “elliptical,” “autonomous,” “pure,” even “gentle."" Most famously, Paul Schrader once called Bresson’s films “transcendental,” while Susan Sontag described them as “spiritual.” Both these critics thus extended in anglicized form a tendency that had early been dominant in Bresson criticism in France: the attempt, made by such Catholic writers as André Bazin, Henri Agel, Roger Leenhardt, and Amédée Ayfre, to understand Bresson's work in religious terms, seeing his camera as a kind of god and the material world as (paradoxically) a thing of the spirit. That attempt, in Sontag’s essay, led to the introduction of Bresson to the New York-based avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, whose films—such as Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968), for one—show the influence of the French director’s severe, reductivist style. Jean-Luc Godard, of course, needed no such critical introduction to Robert Bresson, for, in his iconoclasm and integrity, in his rejection of the Gallic “Cinéma du Papa” as well as in his embrace of film as an independent art, Bresson was one of the heroes of the young directors who constituted the French New Wave in the early 1960s. So much so that Godard was moved to say in Cahiers du cinéma in 1957 that “Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music."" The result is that Bresson has undeniably influenced a slew of contemporary European filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Laurent Cantet, Alain Cavalier, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Claire Denis, Jacques Doillon, Bruno Dumont, Michael Haneke, Benoît Jacquot, and Maurice Pialat--not to speak of his influence on Asian and American cinema. Bresson and Others: Spiritual Syle in the Cinema is an attempt to document this influence through essays on fifteen international directors who followed in Bresson's wake, who in fact may have influenced him (Carl Dreyer), or who contemporaneously worked veins similar to those found in Bresson's films (Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro Ozu). These essays are preceded by an introduction to the cinema of Robert Bresson and followed by film credits, a bibliography of criticism, and an index. The subject of Bresson and Others, then, may specifically be Bressonian cinema, but, in a general sense, it could also be said to be spirit and matter--or film and faith. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Ruby Cheung with D. H. Fleming,"Cinemas, Identities and Beyond",Hardback,978-1-4438-0975-7,39.99,"Cinemas, Identities and Beyond examines different modes of representing and constructing identities in and through the medium of film, transcending the narrow confines of the local / national / regional, and challenging spatial and temporal boundaries. It gathers fifteen essays that explore different dimensions of identities in contexts ranging from domestic spheres, urban milieus, socio-political environments, diasporic film-making issues, anthropology, film festivals, and psychoanalysis, to the examination of stardom in society. Engaging with cinematic representations, narrative conventions, film form, industry concerns, and other socio-cultural-economic-political factors relating to the production, distribution, exhibition and consumption of film, Cinemas, Identities and Beyond contributes to one of the most thought-provoking contemporary debates on cinemas and identities in film studies. Revisiting films such as Farewell My Concubine, The Matrix trilogy, The Straight Story, El Topo, and Days of Being Wild, this anthology establishes a framework that actively queries stabilised, ideological paradigms. The book discovers new frontiers and discourses to help us better understand ourselves and our surroundings when another decade of the new millennium is about to begin. Cinemas, Identities and Beyond will prove to be of value to a broad range of scholars, critics and students who are interested in issues pertaining to identities, and their construction in and beyond film. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,"Anne Hardcastle, Roberta Morosini and Kendall Tarte",Coming of Age on Film: Stories of Transformation in World Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-0987-0,34.99,"In Coming of Age on Film: Stories of Transformation in World Cinema, essays by twelve film scholars examine the theme of coming of age in the cinema of Latin America, Europe, and Africa. Through their consideration of the development that leads to transformation in individuals, nations, or even the film industry itself, these articles elucidate the connections among these diverse films. Bringing together a variety of related topics such as rites of passage, adolescence and maturity, and the literary genre of the Bildungsroman, Coming of Age on Film complements and puts into practice a variety of critical theories. Its focus on global cinema in French, Italian, and Spanish brings attention to the widely represented but minimally studied theme of coming of age. This volume will appeal to scholars in film studies and regional or national cultural studies, as well as those studying adolescence in literature and film. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-08-01,Colin Counsell and Roberta Mock,"Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory",Hardback,978-1-4438-1120-0,39.99,"The subject of cultural memory, and of the body’s role in its creation and dissemination, is central to current academic debate, particularly in relation to performance. Viewed from a variety of theoretical positions, the actions of the meaning-bearing body in culture and its capacity to reproduce, challenge or modify existing formulations have been the focus of some of the most influential studies to emerge from the arts and humanities in the last two and a half decades. The ten essays brought together in Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory address this subject from a unique diversity of perspectives, focusing on topics as varied as live art, puppetry, memorial practice, ‘cultural performance’ and dance. Dealing with issues ranging from modern nation building to the formation of diasporic identities, this volume collectively considers the ways in which the human soma functions as a canvas for cultural meaning, its forms and actions a mnemonics for constructions of a shared past. This volume is required reading for those interested in how bodies, both on stage and in everyday life, 'perform' meaning. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-08-01,Rachel S. Ritterbusch,Practical Approaches to Teaching Film,Hardback,978-1-4438-1112-5,39.99,"Rachel Ritterbusch’s Practical Approaches to Teaching Film is a collection of essays focusing on the use of film in settings ranging from an introductory film class to an upper-division Women’s Studies course. Drawing on their experience in the classroom, contributors to this anthology show how movies can be used to promote critical thinking, create an awareness of the male gaze, challenge dominant ideology, and unmask the constructedness of film. This volume treats a wide variety of film texts, from box-office hits like The Da Vinci Code to underappreciated art films such as Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions; from Pépé le Moko and other French classics to more contemporary francophone works like Chaos and Rosetta; from self-reflexive films that interrogate the act of filmmaking itself to those that draw attention to the phallocentric nature of cinematic apparatus. Common to all these essays is the belief that, if used judiciously, film can be a valuable pedagogical tool. Aimed both at those currently teaching film and those wishing to do so, this volume provides practical support in the form of sample syllabi, assignments, and a glossary of film terms. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-08-01,Pascale Drouet,The Spectacular In and Around Shakespeare,Hardback,978-1-4438-1105-7,34.99,"This volume addresses the economy of the spectacular in and around Shakespeare’s plays, both in early modern England and in late-twentieth/twenty-first-century adaptations and appropriations. Apart from addressing issues such as (im)plausibility, tours de force arousing amazement, and excess for the sake of entertainment, it raises the question of intentionality—what is behind the spectacular? Is there always a manipulative purpose? How far-reaching are the political and ideological stakes? The contributors to this volume investigate a broad spectrum of particular phenomena: the spectacular sound effects and pyrotechnics displayed for the opening of the Globe theatre with Julius Caesar on performance; George Gascoigne’s lavish 1575 pageant commissioned by the Earl of Leicester for the queen at Kenilworth (The Princely Pleasures); the relationship between the spectacular and scientific discoveries, as well as their dialectics of appropriation; the impact of Mannerist art on The Winter’s Tale; Coriolanus’ resistance to ostentation and political shows; the anti-spectacular counter-current running through Timon of Athens; Julia Pascal’s innovative 2007 stage production of The Merchant of Venice; apocalyptic screen adaptations of turn-of-the-century Jacobean tragedies, and Richard III’s potential to be graphically interpreted in 2008 as political satire and as a danse macabre. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-09-01,Bert Cardullo,Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews,Hardback,978-1-4438-1260-3,39.99,"Jean-Pierre Dardenne trained as an actor and his younger brother, Luc, studied philosophy; but they have dedicated themselves to filmmaking since the 1970s. After earning a reputation in their native Belgium for directing socially and politically conscious documentaries, they directed their first fiction feature, Falsch, in 1986. They have also been active as producers and in 1975 founded Dérives, a company with more than sixty documentaries to its credit. A second company, Les Films du Fleuve, was formed in 1994. The brothers hail from Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking region of Belgium that provides the gritty, postindustrial landscape so omnipresent in their films. In the decade since their third fiction feature, La Promesse (1996), became an international success, the unassuming but highly determined Dardennes have ascended to the forefront of a newly revived socially-conscious European cinema. At a time when filmmaking in Europe, however distinguished, seemed largely unmoored from the social changes wrought by the end of the Soviet empire, La Promesse offered a modest but profound view of illegal immigration and worker exploitation, anchored in the moral complexities of the relationship between a Belgian contractor and his teenaged son. Two prizes at Cannes for Rosetta (1999)—which conveys the obsessive extent to which a teenaged girl demands a job, a home, and a normal life—consecrated the Dardenne brothers as leading international cinéastes. Rosetta was followed by three similarly socially realistic films that are at the same time intimate character portraits: The Son (2002), L’Enfant (2005), and The Silence of Lorna (2008). In each of their five feature films since 1996, the Dardennes’ rigorous, handheld camerawork and highly selective framing merge with physically intense acting to evoke a realistic tradition infused with philosophical and spiritual depth—one that hearkens back to both Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is the first book in English to treat the work of the Dardennes, and features the best essays and interviews (supplemented by a chronology, a filmography, film credits, and a bibliography) published to date on the two brothers’ memorable films. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-09-01,Margit Rohringer,"Documents on the Balkans – History, Memory, Identity: Representations of Historical Discourses in the Balkan Documentary Film",Hardback,978-1-4438-1241-2,44.99,"This book explores historical discourses on the various forms of identity production in film that are based on memory and shows how these narratives get 'mediated' by (documentary) film. Most films about the Balkans produced in the last two decades were in fact made in response to immediate concerns about the economic crises and political conflicts that struck the region during the 1990s. These new forms of communication about history mostly show a rather self-critical approach. The book's case studies give the reader a clear idea of how processes informing identity formations are directly launched and later on maintained in peoples' real and everyday lives. Thus, the case studies' principal objective is to integrate the study of 'private space' with existing macro-debates in politics as well as with dominant discourses within the academic community. The included case studies focus on several topics, i.e. migration, the reproduction and protection of personal as well as collective identities in post-socialist societies, revolutionary processes towards the official end of the Cold War, the (re-)creation of politically constructed narratives, generational conflicts in the post-socialist period, and the fate of women during the war. The multifaceted view of the region under focus in this study shows that common grounds and differences co-exist in the Balkan space, be it on a cultural, economic, social or (geo)-political level. Apart from the field of film studies, this work is a powerful contribution to cultural history as well as to the growing field of visual history. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-09-01,Bert Cardullo,"Vittorio De Sica: Actor, Director, Auteur",Paperback,978-1-4438-1233-7,19.99,"Recognized as a master of Italian and world cinema, Vittorio De Sica is considered one of the major proponents of neorealism, an Italian movement that forever altered the content and style of the cinema worldwide. This work covers De Sica's entire career as a stage and screen actor, director, and screenwriter. Vittorio De Sica: Actor, Director, Auteur begins with a chronology of this great artist's life and work. A lengthy essay then discusses his biographical and career information in detail, with special attention given to the years following the war when De Sica directed Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D--the films that made him famous. Succeeding sections offer stage acting credits, screen acting credits, a filmography of De Sica's directorial work, selected credits related to De Sica's neorealist films, and a filmography of De Sica's work as a screenwriter, as well as a series of still images from his cinematic oeuvre. Two interviews with the master and a statement by De Sica himself provide additional insights. A bibliography of works by and about De Sica in the English language concludes the book, followed by a comprehensive index. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-10-01,Siân Adiseshiah,Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill,Hardback,978-1-4438-1318-1,39.99,"Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism. ","“By persuasively locating Churchill’s drama within the concerns of the British Left as they evolved from the optimistic 1960s to the fragmented present, Sian Adiseshiah uncovers the plays’ political bedrock, which has been unfortunately obscured by successive waves of critical fashion. The result is a compelling reassessment of one of the world’s leading playwrights in light of the political tradition she herself explicitly embraces. It is also an illuminating—if sobering—account of the fate of political theatre after the demise of collectivist politics. This book performs an essential correction and expansion of our understanding of Churchill’s ambitious and principled drama.” —Una Chaudhuri, Collegiate Professor, Professor of English and Drama, New York University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-10-01,Judith Roof,Talking Drama,Hardback,978-1-4438-1330-3,34.99,"The essays in Talking Drama ask what the relation is between drama and its critics. In so far as we conceive of drama and theatre as arising from and providing some sense of social ritual and comment, drama is itself a critical genre, showing up the foibles and problems of human existence as well as the general hubris and errors of society. Plays both constitute criticism--of society, of ideas, of other plays--and deploy such self-critical gambits as plays within plays, characters who watch other characters, characters feigning roles and personalities, and even the overt inclusion of characters who are critics. Plays, thus, comment both on themselves and on the art of theatre generally. At the same time, drama implies other kinds of critics in the guise of the audience, reviewers, and those who might participate in its ideas. Just as plays produce the seeds of their own critique, so they also spur critique of their aesthetics, the artistry of their performance, and the ideas and conflicts they illustrate. Critics who review play performances are as much an intrinsic part of theatrical events as the audience and the plays themselves. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-11-01,Vikki Jackson,Flash Parade: A Photo Montage of a Theatrical Touring Company,Paperback,978-1-4438-1380-8,34.99,"Flash Parade was the name that the legendary Vic Loving gave to her touring company which travelled the length and breadth of Ireland and parts of England from the 1920’s to the early 1960’s. She was also known as the ‘Sequin Queen’ for lavishly made costumes used by her dancers and actors in her productions. It was unusual for a woman to run her own business never mind a large company of musicians- actors and dancers in a country that was going through some dark times.... but as those who recalled her, she brought ‘colour- gaiety and glamour’ to an otherwise grey backdrop which was Ireland of that era.... This book is just a small selection of photos in a considerable collection of other theatrical memorabilia held by Vikki Jackson. Following on from Vikki’s first book ‘Gags and Greasepaint’ this book contains further reminiscences...... ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-11-01,Ian Craven,Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-1344-0,44.99,"Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema offers a critical response to the still under-explored mode of amateur cinema, as a particular sphere of British film practice. Concentrating upon a roughly fifty-year period (1930-1980), during which such filmmaking grew rapidly as a significant leisure activity in Britain, the volume shows how popular ‘cine’ assumed distinctive institutional and ideological forms, and some remarkable aesthetic emphases, grounded in consistent technical and critical apparatuses. Although an outline history of such filmmaking is certainly implicit, the priority of Movies On Home Ground is to offer a series of overlapping perspectives on amateur movie-making, with a view to locating such filmmaking as a component of the broader shape of British film culture. Emphasis is thus given to institutional contexts, technical determinants, and the social formations of practising filmmakers, as well as to concerns with the construction of amateur outlooks, understandings of amateur aesthetics, and the remarkable diversity of amateur genericity. The anthology thus supplies a text offering support to courses dealing with the many varieties of non-professional participation best understood as truly ‘amateur’, rather than as ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ filmmaking. By granting the amateur a place within the acknowledged range of significant interventions, the recognised canon of British filmmaking is widened in fascinating new directions. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe,"Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2009",Hardback,978-1-4438-1649-6,44.99,"The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Third International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Lincoln, May 16-18, 2009. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessors in 2005 and 2007, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen twenty-one volumes in print, with another twelve in press or in the process of being written. The 2009 conference and the book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness. Fifty-six delegates from twenty-one countries across the world attended the May 2009 conference in Lincoln; their range of disciplines and approaches is reflected well in this book. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and Daniel Watt,"Ethical Encounters: Boundaries of Theatre, Performance and Philosophy",Hardback,978-1-4438-1695-3,39.99,"The essays on dimensions of theatre ethics at the heart of contributions to this volume demonstrate how individual academics and theatre artists have thought about the ethical implications of theatre, and present the concepts and paradigms that have guided and influenced their thinking. They raise relevant issues and debate these in clearly defined, but not uniform ways—ways that have helped them to come to terms with the issues they raise. The reader may agree or disagree with individual authors or individual arguments. If such agreement or disagreement supports them to form and develop their own opinions and resultant actions, this book has served its purpose. This volume arises from the 2007 and 2008 TaPRA conferences and all of its essays, at one level or another, reflect upon what is possible within the environment of theatre. Possibility is one form of ethical engagement with the boundaries of philosophy and performance and reminds us of the inherently political aspect of any ethical question. So whilst the most obviously ethically oriented papers appear towards the end of the volume, in a separate section, let us bear in mind that throughout certain limits of representation will always be in question for any understanding of theatre. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,Ignacio López-Calvo,One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula,Hardback,978-1-4438-1657-1,49.99,"While Said focused on the perceptions and stereotypes of the Near East “Oriental” in England, France and the United States, most of these essays study the decentering interplay between “peripheral” areas of the Third World, “semiperipheral” areas (Spain and Portugal since the second part of the seventeenth century), and marginalized social groups of the globe (Chicanos, African Americans, and Filipino Americans). They explore, for example, how China and the Far East in general are imagined and represented in Latin America and the Caribbean, or how ethnic minorities in the United States, such as Chicanos and African Americans, incorporate Filipino characters in their novels or creolize their music with Chinese influences. As the title of this book suggests, sometimes these “peripheral” areas and social groups talk back to the metropolitan centers of the former empires or look for their mediation, while others they avoid the interference of the First World or of hegemonic social groups altogether in order to address other “peripheral” peoples directly, thus creating rich “South-South” cross-cultural flows and exchanges. The main difference between the imperialistic orientalism studied by Said and this other type of global cultural interaction is that while, in their engagement with the “Orient,” they may be reproducing certain imperialistic fantasies and mental structures, typically there is not an ethnocentric process of self-idealization or an attempt to demonstrate cultural, ontological, or racial superiority in “South-South” intellectual and cultural exchanges. This way to de-center or to “provincialize” Europe—pace Dipesh Chakrabarty—disrupts the traditional center-periphery dichotomy, bringing about multiple and interchangeable centers and peripheries, whose cultures interact with one another without the mediation of the European and North American metropolitan centers. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,Per Brask and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,Performing Consciousness,Hardback,978-1-4438-1634-2,39.99,"Since its inaugural issue in April, 2000, the journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts has regularly published essays on the intersection of theatre and consciousness. Often these essays have seen theatre as a spiritual practice that for both the performer and her audience can bring about experiences that help heal the world, a shift in consciousness. This practice, though spiritual, is not ethereal but is rooted in doing, in actions, in breathing. That is, theatre is seen as an art form understood as part of a whole, as taking place in total Consciousness as well as expressing consciousness(es), making both breathing a source of meaning and shamanic journeying part of the creative process that brings into “being” imaginative resources for the actor that undermines traditional understandings of character/self/ego. All the pieces collected here, then, reveal a concern with consciousness and the theatre, the ways that performance can be a spiritual practice, a means a reaching higher levels of consciousness, as well as the ways the theatre may have healing effects on audiences by engaging them in wider and deeper levels of imagination, the levels where dualities disappear. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,Myron Stagman,Shakespeare’s Double-Dealing Comedies: Deciphering the “Problem Plays”,Hardback,978-1-4438-1636-6,34.99,"Are some of Shakespeare’s romantic storybook heroines actually emoting sexually obscene (but very funny) lines? {“Sexual quibbles (puns, play-on words), covertly uttered by precious-and-pure heroines, call for an immediate revision of viewpoint.”} When Fernando (The Tempest) is described as bravely swimming for shore “in lusty stroke”, would he be disqualified for doing this in Olympic competition? Before the walls of Harfleur, when Henry V threatens to “mow like grass your fresh-fair virgins” and have “your naked infants spitted upon pikes”, is he (and by inference his creator) barbarous? Or is he doing an hilarious comic imitation of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine before the walls of Damascus? {“There exists an interesting Marlovian source for the Tamburlaine protagonist himself—Ivan the Terrible. He proposed marriage to Queen Elizabeth, who tactfully turned him down.”} Rule Number 1: If a good writer seems surprisingly inept and has been known to be a wit or humorist, suspect parody or satire. Well, esteemed readers, you decide where to place your bets. On the critics? Or on William Shakespeare? ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-02-01,Michael Tawa,Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture,Hardback,978-1-4438-1745-5,44.99,"Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture aims to explore parallel approaches to the conceptualisation and composition of place, space, time, materiality and narrative in cinematographic and architectural practices. Beyond drawing useful implications for design, the book investigates a range of themes to mobilise a reconsideration of cinema and architecture as non-representational practices. It suggests that films and buildings can be read and designed as assemblages not directed to the formal expression of meaning, but to the framing of strategic and enabling conditions of emergent sense, realised within the tectonic and material conditions of the cinematic and the architectural as such. Succinct analyses of precedents in film, music, painting and architecture are used to foreground tectonic and compositional characteristics related to spatiality, temporality and narrative that are transferable across disciplines and practices. The thematic framework of the book engages theoretical material by Heidegger, Simondon, Deleuze, Nancy, Agamben and Stiegler. Classical modernist and postmodernist films by Dreyer, Antonioni, Hitchcock, Godard, Paradjanov, Tarkovski, Herzog, Lynch and Heneke are analysed side by side with important traditional, modernist and contemporary buildings, including works by Corbusier, Scarpa, Lewerentz, Zumthor and Markli. Illustrated with drawings and photographs by the author, the book should be of interest to practitioners and students of art, design, cinema and the built environment who wish to expand the creative scope and resonance of their work. ","“In this elegant, erudite work, Michael Tawa traces the points of intersection and difference between architecture and cinema, touching on the materiality of space, time, light and sound - how they are experienced, held in our memories, and reactivated. With great sensitivity and originality Professor Tawa draws on a range of theoretical perspectives offered by Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and Nancy, amongst others, putting them to work in his analysis of the built environment and cinema. Arguing that it is often the more discordant elements between disciplines that produce the most productive resonances, the reader is invited to imagine possibilities for enacting new opportunities for thinking, experiencing and making. It is for this reason that Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture, provides such a valuable resource for emerging and established artists, architects and filmmakers, as well as a broader, critically engaged, reading audience.” —Dr. Elizabeth Presa, Head of The Centre for Ideas, Victoria College of Art, The University of Melbourne “From my own philosophical perspective, Michael Tawa’s work presents a double interest which at the same time situates it at the heart of our fin de siècle contemporary theory: 1) on the one hand, an interest at the level of sense (sense and not meaning), which constitutes, as we know, an acute question for our late modernity threatened by nihilism (or the negation of sense): by proposing the project of a ‘design lexicon’ which goes beyond all technical or thematic dictionaries, he aims to renew and displace the entire field of architectural reflection, firstly by the choice of terms, then by the treatment of their semantic, etymological, evocative or suggestive values. … 2) On the other hand, an interest as the question of being-in-common, that is to say the question of pre-political, pre-social plurality (or else beyond the social and political maybe) that makes of us (human beings, but also all beings) beings-with as essentially as they are, each one and in groups, singular beings. … Hence the double form of this research – significance of design and design of place, questions of place for sense – engages a resolutely active and practical thinking, a philosophy in action of design as that which traces sense or possibilities of sense. This thinking, which it seems to me takes up again the most fundamental vocation of architecture, appears perfectly adapted to the formation of architects, urbanists and landscape architects. …Michael Tawa rests his work on very solid and broad knowledge of the great contemporary philosophical currents, as well as the artistic and ethical givens and sensibilities of a world in whose diversity he moves with great ease of discourse and design, engaging concepts, words, images or tonalities from all sorts of traditions and cultural settings.” — Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosopher “Michael Tawa's writing moves between architecture and film, producing unexpected resonances in the reader. This is a book for creative designers, who will find themselves absorbed in arguments and informed by erudition, but the real point of the reading will be for the effect it will have on the reader's world. Things that passed unnoticed will come into focus. By dwelling on acutely observed moments in films and buildings, Tawa evokes the special qualities that make them memorable, and shows their rapports with one another. Buildings house everyday activities, and films often show us things that are not in themselves remarkable, but with careful juxtaposition, a memory or a shadow, dripping water or brute stone can evoke a sense of something much more deeply interfused. One comes away from the text wanting to act on intuitions that were previously dormant, but which have been gently roused and turn out to have a life of their own.” —Andrew Ballantyne, Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-02-01,Laurel Forster and Sue Harper,British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade,Hardback,978-1-4438-1734-9,44.99,"This collection of essays highlights the variety of 1970s culture, and shows how it responded to the transformations that were taking place in that most elusive of decades. The 1970s was a period of extraordinary change on the social, sexual and political fronts. Moreover, the culture of the period was revolutionary in a number of ways; it was sometimes florid, innovatory, risk-taking and occasionally awkward and inconsistent. The essays collected here reflect this diversity and analyse many cultural forms of the 1970s. The book includes articles on literature, politics, drama, architecture, film, television, youth cultures, interior design, journalism, and contercultural “happenings”. Its coverage ranges across phenomena as diverse as the Wombles and Woman’s Own. The volume offers an interdisciplinary account of a fascinating period in British cultural history. This book makes an important intervention in the field of 1970s history. It is edited and introduced by Laurel Forster and Sue Harper, both experienced writers, and the book comprises work by both established and emerging scholars. Overall it makes an exciting interpretation of a momentous and colourful period in recent culture. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-02-01,Bert Cardullo,"Waves from the East: New World Cinema, Asian Style; Essays and Interviews",Hardback,978-1-4438-1735-6,39.99,"This book is a collection of interviews with, and essays about, not so much the two non-Western filmmakers who introduced the cinema of their respective countries to the West—Akira Kurosawa (Japan) and Satyajit Ray (India), in the 1950s—but those who followed in their wake. From among them, I have chosen representative figures from such countries as Iran, China, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, Kurdistan, and Afghanistan: Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, Bahman Ghobadi, Siddiq Barmak, Samira Makhmalbaf, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hong Sang-soo, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Jun Ichikawa, Kim Ki-duk, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tsai Ming-liang. Waves from the East: New World Cinema, Asian Style documents an alternative to Western brands of cinema, even as these “foreign” directors in some instances integrate Western forms, styles, and genres into their own native traditions. As such, these artists could be said to represent a global filmmaking perspective that now, more than ever, this world—and the American nation in particular—can use. In the case of Iranian filmmakers like Panahi, Majidi, Kiarostami, and the Makhmalbafs, it remains to be seen how much artistic freedom they can retain in the increasingly militant theocracy of Iran. As for Chen Kaige, like Zhang Yimou, something also remains to be seen: the extent to which the Communist Chinese authorities have induced him to make “politics-free” entertainments as opposed to the kind of politically-conscious art films he used to make. Most of the interviews are accompanied by an essay by me on a representative film or films by the director in question. My intent in doing this, of course, is to “bounce” these writings off a director’s own words, to juxtapose what I think of his work against what he, the filmmaker, thinks of his work. The essayist and interviewees don’t always agree, but why must we? Moreover, I have tried to select interviews that are as artistically inclusive as possible. That is, the questions focus on practical matters related to filmmaking as much as they do on historical, aesthetic, and critical-theoretical issues raised by the films themselves. Richly illustrated with film stills, Waves from the East concludes with a bibliography, individual filmographies, and a comprehensive index ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-03-01,Joya Uraizee,In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film,Paperback,978-1-4438-1781-3,24.99,"This book analyzes representations of mass violence in film and fiction about African, South American, and Asian genocides, from the points of view of the bystander and the survivor. It argues that in commercial film and fiction, metaphors and looks represent the violence and trauma indirectly, even when the representation is quite graphic; whereas in experimental novels and films, looks used to describe the violence are individualized or interactive. Both Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India and Deepa Mehta’s film Earth deal with the violence of the partition of India in 1947. While Cracking India educates us about the dangers of “the beast” (the violence), Earth shows us the impact the beast has on victims like the beautiful Ayah/nanny. Similarly, both Buchi Emecheta's novel Destination Biafra and Charles Enonchong's videos The Nigerian-Biafran War, Parts I, II & III, depict the Nigerian Civil War of 1966–69. Yet, while Emecheta’s metaphors of division and bestiality highlight the selfishness of politicians and the suffering of civilians like Debbie, looks exchanged by the survivors and the military in Enonchong’s videos highlight the tragic ways in which generals like Ojukwu betrayed and were betrayed. Metaphors and looks in Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits and Bille August’s movie, which is based on it, depict the terror of Pinochet’s 1973–89 dictatorship in Chile. Allende and August use metaphors and looks of sight and blindness to describe torture survivor Alba/Blanca’s trauma. Alba/Blanca re-tells the events of the past in order to survive. Photo journalist Alfredo Jaar’s photos and notes, Let There Be Light, and Terry George’s feature film Hotel Rwanda, both depict the Rwandan genocide of 1994, but their emphasis is on inability of the Western bystander/reader to hear or see the pain of the survivors. Accordingly, Jaar and George choose “dark” metaphors and looks to represent the violence, using diffuse lighting, fades, and absences to stand for the violence and trauma. Overall, representations of genocide that involve individualized metaphors and interactive looks are vitally important if the complexities of that violence are to be appreciated in the West. ","Joya Uiraizee’s In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film raises one of the hot issues for our times: how we deal with the representation of violence, and specifically with traumatic violence. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and longterm conflict have made familiar the distressing features of child soldiers, rape, and massive population displacements. How are we not only to understand the Rwandan genocide, India’s partition, and Chile’s repressive state under Pinochet? How do we relate these events entailing massive destruction and brutality, often employed so as to control valuable resources or territory, to historical events like the Biafran Civil war of 1967-70 in Nigeria. Most importantly, how do we confront these conflicts in their various mediations? Joya Uraizee poses the central question of mediation by examining a range of key texts that serve to present the genocides and violent traumas endemic to conflict that have marked many postcolonial societies. Those texts range over well-known novels, like Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits, films like Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Mehta’s Earth, and a number of other works that have given us some of the best-known representations of violent conflict. Additionally, she explore some lesser known novels or testimonies, like Sidwa’s Cracking India, Enonchong’s documentary video films on the Biafran war, and Alfredeo Jaar’s book of photographs, that serve to elucidate her principal thesis. Uraizee claims that we can best assess the representations of violence by asking whether we are given images, in the forms of metaphors and gazes, that permit us to engage and work through the violence, or that fetishize and avoid the direct physical realities of the violence. She analyzes a range of stratagems that serve to absolve our consciences without bringing home the truths we need to experience and engage the traumas. Part of the truth we must face rests on the fact that we cannot help but be witness or observer. But there are many ways to look, and some leave us with insight and motivation while others merely satisfied, and with the structures of power undisturbed. The teaching about global violence today requires that we assess clearly how our positioning with relation to the texts of violence responds to this basic ethical imperative: though we cannot resolve the conflict, we are obliged to confront it unflinchingly if meaningful praxis is to follow. At that point, as Uraizee claims, our looking will become a “process” involving a “circle of gazes” in which the goals of oppositionality can become possible. —Kenneth W. Harrow, Professor of English, Michigan State University ""As the merciless flow of digital reality turns us all into numb spectators, Uraizee sets out here to re-imagine the role of the “observer” in a century of genocide. A skeptical, and often emotional, testament to the ability of novels and films to make history’s literary bystanders more than voyeurs and less than the victims themselves. Its subtitle might well read “the purifying power of empathy,” and its analysis of the different ways of seeing mass murder (interactive, circular, blinding) is wide-ranging, placing literature itself back in the world where it belongs."" - Professor Timothy Brennan, Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-04-01,Ruby Cheung with D. H. Fleming,"Cinemas, Identities and Beyond",Paperback,978-1-4438-1937-4,19.99,"Cinemas, Identities and Beyond examines different modes of representing and constructing identities in and through the medium of film, transcending the narrow confines of the local / national / regional, and challenging spatial and temporal boundaries. It gathers fifteen essays that explore different dimensions of identities in contexts ranging from domestic spheres, urban milieus, socio-political environments, diasporic film-making issues, anthropology, film festivals, and psychoanalysis, to the examination of stardom in society. Engaging with cinematic representations, narrative conventions, film form, industry concerns, and other socio-cultural-economic-political factors relating to the production, distribution, exhibition and consumption of film, Cinemas, Identities and Beyond contributes to one of the most thought-provoking contemporary debates on cinemas and identities in film studies. Revisiting films such as Farewell My Concubine, The Matrix trilogy, The Straight Story, El Topo, and Days of Being Wild, this anthology establishes a framework that actively queries stabilised, ideological paradigms. The book discovers new frontiers and discourses to help us better understand ourselves and our surroundings when another decade of the new millennium is about to begin. Cinemas, Identities and Beyond will prove to be of value to a broad range of scholars, critics and students who are interested in issues pertaining to identities, and their construction in and beyond film. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-04-01,"Inma Álvarez, Héctor J. Pérez and Francisca Pérez-Carreño",Expression in the Performing Arts,Hardback,978-1-4438-1953-4,44.99,"The performing arts represent a significant part of the artistic production in our culture. Correspondingly the fields of drama, film, music, opera, dance and performance studies are expanding. However, these arts remain an underexplored territory for aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Expression in the Performing Arts tries to contribute to this area. The volume collects essays written by international scholars who address a variety of themes concerning the core philosophical topic of expression in the theory of the performing arts. Specific questions about the ontology of art, the nature of the performances, the role of the performer, and the relations between spectators and works emerge from the study of the performing arts. Besides, these arts challenge the unchanging physicality of other kinds of works of art, usually the direct result of creative individual artist, and barely affected by the particular circumstances of their exhibition. Expression is one of the issues that adopt a special character in the performing arts. Do singers, dancers or actors express the feelings a work is expressive of? How does the performer contribute to the expressive content of the work? How does the spectator emotionally respond to the physical proximity of the performers? Is aesthetic distance avoided in the understanding of the performing arts? How are the expressive properties of work, performance and characters related? And how are the subjectivities they embody revealed? The contributions presented here are not all in agreement on the right answers to theses questions, but they offer a critical and exciting discussion of them. In addition to original proposals on the theoretical aspect of expression in the performing arts, the collection includes analyses of individual artists, historical productions and concrete works of art, as well as reflections on performative practice. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-04-01,Pirkko Koski and Melissa Sihra,The Local Meets the Global in Performance,Hardback,978-1-4438-1947-3,39.99,"This anthology explores the ways in which theatre and performance functions at the interstices of contemporary local and global networks. Theatre and performance occurs in time and space and exists between the audience and performer as a communicative event. This local world of experience and human interactivity is not easily subsumed by global networks or commercial systems and remains a potent force of expression and, at times, resistance. The volume offers a range of critical viewpoints from which to evaluate the interrelationality of the local and the global, such as philosophical cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, feminism, class, ethnicity, gender and the experience of the diasporic or exilic artist. The anthology concludes with a reflection between Janelle Reinelt and Marvin Carlson upon the ideas put forth in the book and the broader connectivities of the local and the global. Reinelt and Carlson reveal that these concepts should not be regarded in opposition but, rather, as entangled, something which is reflected in this volume as a whole. A number of international productions and performance practices are discussed from diverse geographical and cultural perspectives, illuminating the complexity of the local and the global. As Reinelt suggests: “The global-local category as a hyphenated concept has become a slogan now, a cliché even. It first arose because the local was supposed to save the global from totalisation, but in fact the global-local concept became, in reality, so complex that this opposition was not useful anymore.” Carlson’s and Reinelt’s engagement with the essays, and with the broader issues of the global and the local, marks an important intervention into how we process experience through theatre and performance in the world today. Contributors include: Marvin Carlson, Shams Eldin, Lynette Hunter, Pirkko Koski, Yana Meerzon, Yasushi Nagata, Janelle Reinelt, Heike Roms, Nehad Selaiha, Melissa Sihra, Juha Sihvola, Joanne Tompkins, Denise Varney and Farah Yeganeh. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-05-01,"Ross P. Garner, Melissa Beattie and Una McCormack","Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures",Hardback,978-1-4438-1960-2,39.99,"The successful regeneration of Doctor Who in the twenty-first century has sparked unprecedented popular success and renewed interest within the academy. The ten essays assembled in this volume draw on a variety of critical approaches—from cultural theory to audience studies, to classical reception and musicology—to form a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of Doctor Who, classic and new, and its spin-off series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. With additional contributions from Andrew Pixley, Robert Shearman, Barnaby Edwards, and Matt Hills, the volume is intended to be accessible to everyone, from interested academics in relevant fields to the general public. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-05-01,Kate Dorney and Ros Merkin,The Glory of the Garden: Regional Theatre and the Arts Council 1984-2009,Paperback,978-1-4438-2059-2,24.99,"The Glory of the Garden examines concepts and contexts of 'regional' theatre in an age of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. It outlines the key debates and trends in the development of regional theatre since 1984 when public subsidy became a part of a package of 'plural funding' and examines regional theatre's role in the theatrical ecology. Variously perceived as a training ground for practitioners or a career dead-end; purveyor of stale product or innovative powerhouse; a transformer of urban environments and community hub, regional theatre has been a constant source of anxiety and pride for the Arts Council, the theatre community and arts journalists. The Glory of the Garden moves the debate about the role and importance of regional theatre beyond the cliché of crisis to examine the politics and policy of making performance outside London. This study combines contextual essays with practitioners' accounts and case studies including: Birmingham Rep; Bristol Old Vic; Liverpool Everyman; Liverpool Playhouse; Lyric Hammersmith; New Victoria Theatre Stoke; Nottingham Playhouse; Salisbury Playhouse and key touring companies: Cheek by Jowl; Complicité; and Kneehigh Theatre. ","""In ten essays this timely examination of England's regional stages ventures beneath the 1984-2009 banner headlines headlines of crisis, gloom and doom to explore national and local plans and politics in the context of individual cases of tragedy and neglect. As well as providing a concise summary of the detais and consequences of key documents this anthology offers valuable insights into the complex web of relationships and events that has shaped recent developments."" Shirley Brown, Historian at Bristol old Vic, Bristol Review of Books, Issue 15, August 2010, pg 26 ""...this book, utterly absorbing for anyone interested in the national as opposed to simply the National Theatre, is concerned with the long struggle to establish how the Arts Council was to relate to the regions."" Paul Allen, Fellow in Creativity and Performance at the University of Warwick in Prompt Vol. 59, Jan 2011 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-05-01,Kate Dorney and Ros Merkin,The Glory of the Garden: Regional Theatre and the Arts Council 1984-2009,Hardback,978-1-4438-1976-3,39.99,"The Glory of the Garden examines concepts and contexts of 'regional' theatre in an age of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. It outlines the key debates and trends in the development of regional theatre since 1984 when public subsidy became a part of a package of 'plural funding' and examines regional theatre's role in the theatrical ecology. Variously perceived as a training ground for practitioners or a career dead-end; purveyor of stale product or innovative powerhouse; a transformer of urban environments and community hub, regional theatre has been a constant source of anxiety and pride for the Arts Council, the theatre community and arts journalists. The Glory of the Garden moves the debate about the role and importance of regional theatre beyond the cliché of crisis to examine the politics and policy of making performance outside London. This study combines contextual essays with practitioners' accounts and case studies including: Birmingham Rep; Bristol Old Vic; Liverpool Everyman; Liverpool Playhouse; Lyric Hammersmith; New Victoria Theatre Stoke; Nottingham Playhouse; Salisbury Playhouse and key touring companies: Cheek by Jowl; Complicité; and Kneehigh Theatre. ","""In ten essays this timely examination of England's regional stages ventures beneath the 1984-2009 banner headlines headlines of crisis, gloom and doom to explore national and local plans and politics in the context of individual cases of tragedy and neglect. As well as providing a concise summary of the detais and consequences of key documents this anthology offers valuable insights into the complex web of relationships and events that has shaped recent developments."" Shirley Brown, Historian at Bristol old Vic, Bristol Review of Books, Issue 15, August 2010, pg 26 ""...this book, utterly absorbing for anyone interested in the national as opposed to simply the National Theatre, is concerned with the long struggle to establish how the Arts Council was to relate to the regions."" Paul Allen, Fellow in Creativity and Performance at the University of Warwick in Prompt Vol. 59, Jan 2011 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Madelena Gonzalez and Patrice Brasseur,Authenticity and Legitimacy in Minority Theatre: Constructing Identity,Hardback,978-1-4438-2120-9,44.99,"Contemporary theatre is one of the best ways for ethno-cultural minorities to express themselves, whether they be of indigenous origin or immigrants. It is often used to denounce social injustice and discrimination and, more generally, it helps to air questions debated in the wider community. It may also express itself thanks to the staging of collective memory, for it constitutes a privileged space for the exploration of the trauma of the past (colonial, for example), as well as providing a means of effecting the reconfiguration of a new identity, or of articulating an uneasiness about that identity. Should minority theatre increase its visibility in relation to the mainstream, or, on the contrary, remain on the margins and assert its specificity? This question is at the centre of French-Canadian experience, for example, but also applies to other postcolonial societies, in Europe and elsewhere. In order to maintain its cultural authenticity, should this type of theatre distinguish itself from a multiculturalism that runs the risk of political and social recuperation? If it is unable to resist the model proposed by globalization and widespread cultural dissemination, will it lose its legitimacy? Can, and should there be, a form of popular art at the service of the community? The term “minority” raises questions that will be examined by the articles collected in this volume. What is the definition of a minority? Does this term refer to experimental and avant-garde art forms as well as to ethno-cultural drama? Contemporary theatre is characterized by an aesthetics of hybridity—in what measure is this the case for theatre outside the mainstream? The exploration of this kind of theatre necessitates an examination of the very concept of theatre per se. Since the development of the electronic media as the privileged vector of culture, has not the theatrical genre itself become a minority art form? These are some of the pressing questions that this volume will try to address, thanks to a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary approach that aims to reveal the rich diversity of the field under study. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,William Hope,Italian Film Directors in the New Millennium,Hardback,978-1-4438-2075-2,39.99,"This collection of essays examines the themes and styles that characterize the new millennium work of Italian film directors from different generations. These artists range from Marco Bellocchio, Dario Argento, Marco Tullio Giordana, and Nanni Moretti, who made their name in the 1960s and 1970s, to Oscar winners such as Gabriele Salvatores who forged their careers in the late 1980s. The volume also features essays on Ciprì and Maresco, Emanuele Crialese, Cristina Comencini, as well as work on successful new millennium directors such as Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone whose controversial films examine the nature of interpersonal relations and the individual’s rapport with Italian society today. The essays illustrate the way in which contrasting images of Italy and its provinces emerge in the work of different directors; what links new millennium Italian screen protagonists, film directors, and even individual spectators is often a sense of being at the centre of oppressively converging social, economic, and political forces and having diminishing opportunities and space for self-realization. The contributors to the volume are academics who have also worked as film critics, visual artists, film industry administrators, and, indeed, as film-makers, and the book’s foreword has been written by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. ","“While seeking to characterise the oeuvre of individual fin-de-siècle–new millennium Italian directors, this volume also bears witness to the economic, political and even social constraints against which they struggle to create serious cinema in an increasingly hard-nosed, over-commercialised world. This collection of essays will prove invaluable in any serious attempt to understand the deep-rooted connections between cinema and society in contemporary Italy.” —Prof. Doug Thompson, University of Hull “Many of the films featured in this volume stand resolutely on the margins—and rightly so, since in the absence of an agreed centrality, the margins are more worthy to be focused on than the centre. In this work focused on the margins, the role of individual authors is of paramount importance. We are not talking here of ‘auteur’ cinema in the traditional sense but of distinct and distinctly authorial voices crying from the wilderness and demanding to be heard. The success of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il divo and Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra is perhaps a sign that Italian cinema is moving to regain the centrality it appeared to have lost. But centrality does not necessarily mean consensus. There is still a lot of work to be done on the margins, and in worlds about which there is not likely to be agreement for some time. Meanwhile, the story told in this volume should be read as the story of a new beginning.” —Prof. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Queen Mary, University of London ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Bert Cardullo,"Loach and Leigh, Ltd.: The Cinema of Social Conscience",Hardback,978-1-4438-2108-7,39.99,"The film directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh have addressed the erosion of regional and class identities in an English landscape rendered increasingly uniform by consumerism. Descendants of the social-realist flowering in British cinema of the 1960s, Loach and Leigh have assessed the impact of such consumerism—of the consumer society or the consumerist mentality—primarily on family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state and the consensus that it had once built, and examining the ruptures in domestic as well as social life wrought by divisive governmental policies in an increasingly fragmented, multicultural Britain. The work of both men thus seems to reflect the shift from the collectivist consensus of the postwar years to the individualist, material concerns of more recent decades. Moreover, if the social realists of the 1960s sometimes shortsightedly blamed women for the blighting of British manhood, women in the films of Loach and Leigh—in the former director’s Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), say, or the latter’s Career Girls (1997)—are often complex and powerful individuals. Regularly compared to his fellow filmmaker Ken Loach, Mike Leigh shares Loach’s concern with everyday life and the dramatic conflicts that underlie it, but, with the marked exception of Naked (1994) and Meantime (1983), two films which place their protagonists in defiant opposition to the society they find themselves in, Leigh is less political. Loach, for his part, is a campaigning artist; in such films as Land and Freedom (1995) and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), his characters serve some purpose or agenda beyond the simple telling of a story. In contrast, Leigh focuses almost wholly on character itself, illuminating the incidents and accidents and calamities of people’s work, love-lives, and relationships; there is rarely the sense that the dramatis personae of films of his like Bleak Moments (1971) and Secrets and Lies (1996) are serving as spokesmen for a larger cause beyond themselves. Bert Cardullo’s Loach and Leigh, Ltd.: The Cinema of Social Conscience is the first book to consider the work of both Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. It contains an introduction titled “Escaping Their Own Stereotype: Mike Leigh and Ken Loach”; an interview with, and essay about, Leigh: “‘Making People Think Is What It’s All About’” and “Committed Cinema: The Films of Mike Leigh”; Leigh’s filmography, selected credits from his film career, and a bibliography of criticism on his work; an essay about, and interview with, Loach: “Work, Family, and Politics: The Films of Ken Loach” and “‘It’s Not Just about Me’: Ken Loach and the Cinema of Social Conscience”; Loach’s filmography, selected credits from his film career, and a bibliography of criticism on his work. Loach and Leigh, Ltd.: The Cinema of Social Conscience concludes with a thorough-going index and includes a section of thirty-eight photographic stills selected from the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Bennett Kravitz,Representations of Illness in Literature and Film,Hardback,978-1-4438-2083-7,34.99,"This book examines the ways that various syndromes, disorders and diseases appear in modern literature and film. What is especially interesting is that rather than be portrayed as an insurmountable handicap, limitation becomes the hero of the novels and films under discussion. What once would have been rejected as flawed, ill, diseased or unworthy has now earned the opportunity to be included into mainstream society. By accepting the other, these works of art allow previous outcasts of society into the mainstream to affirm their moral worth, skill and intelligence. Representations of Illness in Literature and Film analyzes the deconstruction of the above mentioned syndromes, disorders and diseases to describe their reception in the 21st-century, postmodern world. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Chris Hansen,"Ruminations, Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who",Hardback,978-1-4438-2084-4,44.99,"Peregrinations, Ruminations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who examines the famous BBC science fiction show as a cultural artifact in dialogue with other science fiction, with politics and religion, and with the culture at large, both in terms of how it reflects and comments upon that culture and in terms of the audience and the peculiarities of its response. This book enables researchers in film and media to make historical, industrial, aesthetic, and ideological connections between and among Doctor Who and other shows and historical events since its inception in 1963. This volume is a new entry in a relatively new area. As the young fans of Doctor Who have matured, and as many have become scholars, they are returning to the show to consider it from a scholarly perspective. It is also of use in the media studies classroom to address directly the issues presented by the longest running science fiction show in the history of the medium. Peregrinations, Ruminations, and Regenerations considers not only cultural ramifications and connections, but audience studies as well. ","“As more and more scholarship turns to the study of individual TV series, this book makes a significant contribution to the field of television studies. Chris Hansen has put together an impressive collection of essays that focuses on an important question: why has the British series Doctor Who remained such a compelling and appealing show for so long? The chapters, written by established and upcoming media scholars, offer no singular answer and instead interrogate the series’ appeal from a variety of viewpoints, including race, gender, nation, globalization, identity, religion, history, and the show’s audiences. This is a compelling collection.” —Jon Kraszewski, Seton Hall University; author of The New Entrepreneurs: An Institutional History of Television Anthology Writers ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera,Worlds in Words: Storytelling in Contemporary Theatre and Playwriting,Hardback,978-1-4438-2109-4,39.99,"The collection of essays Worlds in Words: Storytelling in Contemporary Theatre takes up the currently widely debated issue of the revival of various techniques of storytelling in contemporary theatre practice and playwriting. This topic is set in a larger context of the crisis of traditional theatrical and dramatic representation in the 20th century and sets the discussion of new storytelling techniques within the framework of cultural and post-colonial studies, as well as the recent theories of performativity. These new performative modes of theatre practice in the recent decades have exerted a strong impact on the mainstream staging techniques as well as on the form and use of texts written for the theatre today. By focusing on the basic relationship between the text, the stage and the audience, the papers collected in this volume trace these fundamental changes taking place nowadays, which testify to the major shifts in the understanding of the very concept of theatre, its place among other arts and media, as well as in culture, especially in the marginalized cultures and diasporas. The authors of the papers collected here undertake a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of storytelling and adopt an interdisciplinary approach which will makes it possible to give account of the diverse cultural and socio-political grounding of the contemporary theatrical and dramatic techniques. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-02,Anton Krueger,Experiments in Freedom: Explorations of Identity in New South African Drama,Hardback,978-1-4438-1425-6,39.99,"Experiments in Freedom examines ways in which identities have been represented in recent South African play texts published in English. It begins by exploring descriptions of identity from various philosophical, psychological and anthropological perspectives and elaborates ways in which drama is uniquely suited to represent—as well as to effect—transformations of identity. In exploring the fraught terrain of identity studies, the book examines a selection of play texts in terms of five different discourse of identity—gender, nationalism, ethnicity, syncretism and race. Instead of building a sustained thesis throughout his text, Krueger writes in short bursts about a multiplicity of topics, extending his explorations rhizomatically into the crevices of a new South African society loath to relinquish its stranglehold on the politics of identity. ","“[W]ell written...maps an important field of research with intellectual rigour and exemplary fair-mindedness, and negotiates a complicated route through a plethora of contentious artistic manifestoes and critical opinions with sophistication and maturity.” —Prof. Robert Gordon, Goldsmiths College, University of London “[Experiments in Freedom] shows Krueger's ability to bring an insightful critical perspective not only towards the play texts that he examines, but to theory itself...The style of writing is lucid and avoids obfuscation, the ‘(mis)management’ of syntax and tortured logic, common to some authors writing in a postmodernist vein. This in no way distracts from the complexity of the subject matter or the profound insights that the text offers.” —Prof. Fred Hagemann, Department of Drama, University of Pretoria “[Experiments in Freedom] has been a pleasure to read...The writing exudes clarity and the arguments are cogently rehearsed...[It] guides the reader on a journey that is concomitantly innovative, challenging and informative...written eloquently and lucidly—it deserves a valuable place in its field [and] should be a compulsory text in South African and international libraries.” —Prof. Marcia Blumberg, York University, Toronto “The issues [Experiments in Freedom] addresses...could not be more relevant or topical...Krueger strikes a pleasing balance between the scholarly and the polemical...His tendentiousness is transparent, bold, even refreshing: it carries the force of his conviction and his experience as a South African and a dramatist in his own right...A further strength is that his style is clear and accessible throughout. He succeeds in being scholarly without resorting to jargon or the kind of stodgy academic writing which one encounters all too frequently.” —Prof. David Medalie, Department of English, University of Pretoria ‘…a welcome addition to the field of cultural and performance studies. His [Krueger's] thorough survey of themes in post-apartheid drama provides a multiplicity of approaches to the problematic concept of “freedom”in a South African context. Jamie DeAngelo- Boston University, Africana Book Review June 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-07-01,Thomas Redwood,Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-2218-3,39.99,"“If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.” Almost twenty-five years after the death of Andrei Tarkovsky, the mystery of his films remains alive and well. Recent years have witnessed an ever-increasing number of film theorists, critics and philosophers taking up the challenge to decipher what these films actually mean. But what do these films actually show us? In this study Thomas Redwood undertakes a close formal analysis of Tarkovsky’s later films. Charting the stylistic and narrative innovations in Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia and The Sacrifice, Redwood succeeds in shedding new light on these celebrated but often misunderstood masterpieces of narrative film. Tarkovsky is revealed here both as a cinematic thinker and as an artistic practitioner, a filmmaker of immense poetic significance for the history of cinema. ","“Thomas Redwood has produced an exceptional piece of film scholarship: erudite in its survey of existing work on the director, perceptive in its textual readings and written with a rare degree of stylistic elegance and clarity. The profound accomplishment of Redwood’s study is the precision and clarity he brings to issues concerning Tarkovsky’s place in film studies.” —Associate Professor George Kouvaros, Director of Postgraduate Research, University of New South Wales, Australia ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-07-01,Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar,Cuisine and Symbolic Capital: Food in Film and Literature,Hardback,978-1-4438-2219-0,39.99,"This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines food as it mediates social relationships and self-presentation in a variety of international films and literature. Authors explore the ways that making, eating and thinking about food reveals culture. In doing so the essays highlight how food and foodways become a type of symbolic capital, which influences the larger concern of cultural identity. Essays are organized into three central themes: Culinary Translations of Identity: From Britain to China; Food as Metaphor in Contemporary German Writing; and Love, Feasting and the Symbolic Power of Food in French Writing. Each essay investigates the uses of food as a way to apprehend cultural meaning. The essays presented provide theoretical templates for the study of food in a wide range of international film and literature, ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-07-01,"Patricia O’Byrne, Gabrielle Carty and Niamh Thornton","Transcultural Encounters amongst Women: Redrawing Boundaries in Hispanic and Lusophone Art, Literature and Film",Hardback,978-1-4438-2073-8,39.99,"Traditionally women have found recourse in artistic means to interrogate change and upheaval. This volume explores the experiences of women from Spain, Portugal and Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who themselves have crossed cultural boundaries or have described this experience in their literature and film. Areas investigated in this collection of essays include the experience of the exiled or the immigrant and their personal or collective response to displacement and adaptation: the transcultural potential of cyberspace for women, how patterns and styles of the fashion industry have crossed borders, how women have crossed canonical cultural boundaries in search of identity and meaning, how global cultural influences have manifested in Hispanic and Lusophone cultural practices and production by or about women, and the challenging question of whether canine writing can be considered a branch of feminist theory. Common to most of the essays are the central issues of identity, values, conflict and interconnectedness and an analysis of the patterns that result from the transcultural encounter of these aspects. ","“Edited by three established scholars working in Irish universities and containing new essays by young scholars, this book focuses on cultural production by women in Spain, Portugal and Latin America connected by a common concern with transgressing mainly cultural, but also political and social, boundaries. The works and topics chosen are central to current critical concerns, and of course the richness and vitality of Ibero-American Studies today is due precisely to its being a site of conflict, engagement and hybridity. This book brings the story right up to date, will provoke debate and will be a stimulus for further study.“ —Professor John Macklin, University of Glasgow “The authors draw on an impressive panoply of critical and cultural theorists, to broach such varied issues as female identity, mother-daughter relationships, censorship, racism, transpecies encounters and the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Reading through the essays is akin to a process of accretion in which multiple insights coalesce into a powerful set of testimonies that can only enhance our knowledge and understanding. With this publication, the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the parts, not only because of the unity of theme, but because of the intellectual commitment and integrity each of the authors has brought to their task.” —Dr Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta, University of Birmingham “By engaging so productively with diverse understandings of the transcultural, the volume avoids simplistic and unhelpfully restrictive formulations of this notion. Instead, it allows for concrete practices–in the form of visual and written texts encompassing fine art, literature, oral history, journalism and cultural practices enabled specifically by new technologies–to interrogate existing theoretical articulations about the transcultural. The volume will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as established scholars in Luso-Hispanic cultural studies.” —Par Kumaraswami, Manchester University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-08-01,Emily Caston,Celluloid Saviours: Angels and Reform Politics in Hollywood Film,Hardback,978-1-4438-2269-5,39.99,"In Celluloid Saviours, the author analyses a corpus of US films dating from the silent era that she calls film blanc. In these fantasy films a guardian spirit with extraordinary powers suspends the ordinary, known laws of time and space, and a main character reforms himself or herself in life-changing ways. The author argues that the historical pattern of film blanc relates to the rise and fall of liberal and reform thought in US politics, specifically to conceptions of human nature as a tabula rasa. This conception is evident both in the early feature films featuring angels such as Chaplin’s The Kid and much later examples such as the 1980s box office hit, Trading Places. She argues that this narrative tradition runs from Hollywood’s beginnings to the present day and is foreshadowed in the English ghost stories of Charles Dickens. The classic era of film blanc is epitomised in the enduringly popular film, It’s a Wonderful Life. More recent examples of narrative form analysed by Caston include The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-08-01,Marcelline Block,Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema,Paperback,978-1-4438-2226-8,34.99,"Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze” to the “quantum gaze” in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes” to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.” David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…” This title is now also translated into Italian. ","“Feminist film theory presented in the lucid critical polyphony gathered with unerring critical instinct by Marcelline Block will insist upon a dynamic and mobile attitude facing the gaze.” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania “This volume, given the breadth of the editor’s choices, makes a splendid contribution to an array of feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural studies, media studies, postmodernism and postfeminism. The book may have the effect of inciting readers to reconsider stable methodologies and to conceptualize previously unthought-of ways to approach the gendered/cinematic gaze, performativity of gender and the reshaping of classic feminist film theory in the 21st century. This book lends its readers ‘new eyes’ with which to view canonical texts. The book, upon publication, may very well play a role as a significant scholarly resource; nor is this to forget its other role, that of a textbook for upper/lower-level university courses in departments of film, gender studies, cultural and media studies, among others. I fully recommend this book. I can even imagine I, myself, teaching parts of the book in my seminars on semiotics.” —Marshall Blonsky, PhD, New School University “This volume will be invaluable in helping readers to look afresh at questions of gender, sexuality, and representation in the light of the methodological, aesthetic, and strategic shifts outlined here . . . Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema includes fresh, bold, and new voices alongside very well established scholars in the field, and will no doubt make an important and dynamic contribution to conversations about the role of feminism in contemporary film theory and history. I look forward to teaching sections of this book in a variety of courses, including my courses on film theory, women and film, and the Road Movie.” —Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies; Director, Program in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania “Marcelline Block has edited a compelling collection of essays which includes illuminating discussions of contemporary European and North American filmmakers in which issues pertaining to film theory and women’s studies intersect . . . This is a rich volume and important new book that recontextualizes key concepts by renowned feminist film theorists, and succeeds in reframing those crucial early insights within a new conceptual and historical configuration of feminist film theory in tune with recent cinematic production and historical and cultural realities.” —Gabriel Riera, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois, Chicago “I will say at the outset that the volume makes valuable, original, and often unique contributions to a remarkably wide array of feminist and cinematic fields. Its essays should be required reading for scholars, students, and general readers who care about cinema’s increasingly complex interactions with contemporary culture at large. The range and variety of the chapters constitute one of the book’s best assets, especially since their diversified contents rarely lose sight of the collection’s unifying concern(s) with the ways in which major issues of feminist and postfeminist theory are currently articulated by and through engagements with the politics, aesthetics, and practices of gender, sexuality, authorship, and representation in today’s moving-image media. A welcome byproduct of Marcelline Block’s approach is the rare (and badly needed) consideration given to filmmakers whose unconventional methods and techniques are chronically overlooked (even by many supposedly enlightened critics) precisely because they grow from a recognition that female/feminist filmmakers must conduct risky experiments with the medium if there is to be a chance of overturning the commercial-patriarchal cinema (a cinéma du papa in every sense) that has dominated and determined patterns of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception since the early days of cinema. I must add a note of appreciation for Marcelline Block’s introduction, which amounts to a concisely written summary of where feminist and postfeminist theory have recently been and are situated at the present time, and a richly suggestive view of where they are likely to be in the near future. Marcelline Block and her colleagues are in the forefront of the growing number of scholars who remember that Mulvey’s influential essay concludes with a call for using film theory as a political weapon capable of challenging, disputing, and ultimately overturning the engines of patriarchal bias that have operated for more than a century through the easily exploited conduits of mass-media visual expression. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema will play an important part in academic, sociopolitical, and film-cultural skirmishes for a long time to come.” —David Sterritt, PhD, School of the Arts, Columbia University, Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art; Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film, Long Island University Chair, National Society of Film Critics, Editorial Board, Quarterly Review of Film and Video; Distinguished Visiting Faculty, Goldring Arts Journalism, Syracuse University “Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema is a valuable resource for advanced scholarly research and is recommended for motivated upper-division undergraduate students (by motivated, I mean those undergraduates that are up for a challenge), graduate students and faculty. The scope of the collection's articles is quite vast, and thus will have a broad appeal while at the same time offering substantive content to researchers looking to integrate new material into specific course design or research.” —Eileen M. Angelini, Professor of French, Canisius College (Women in French Studies, vol. 18, 2010, 163-164) “This diverse collection of fourteen essays engages scholars in reflecting upon and (re)viewing cinema’s increasingly complex and far-reaching relationship with contemporary culture. . . . allows for inclusion of bracing readings of films and auteurs not readily considered mainstream, as well as reconsiderations of more well-known works. This collection would serve well primarily as a scholarly resource, and secondarily as a textbook for university courses at the graduate level. For those who teach courses with an emphasis on French cinema, culture, and recent history, Block’s efforts help to bring French cinema into an interdisciplinary focus. The films under discussion come from several countries and cultures, which broadens the examination of the feminist perspective in postwar cinema. The substantive, interdisciplinary, and internationalist approach is one of the collection’s major strengths.” —Eileen M. Angelini, Professor of French, Canisius College (NY), The French Review, vol. 84, no. 5, April 2011, p. 1047 “Ultimately, Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema represents a fresh and innovating addition to existing theories and methods of critical and aesthetical inquiry into women and cinema. The variety of theoretical models used by the contributors in this volume suggests that the feminist gaze today can and should be revisited from a de-centered, de-hierarchisized position. Perhaps, as some of the authors imply, a Deleuzian perspective which allows for multiple horizontal readings rather than a vertical, dual interpretive paradigm would be a more appropriate mode of investigation. By advocating a non-monolithic approach to feminist and postfeminist cinema, the book successfully ties together multiple points of view and effectively rewrites the discourse on the gaze using a new language without rejecting the old.” —Marzia Caporale, University of Scranton, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature, Volume 34, No. 2 (Summer 2010), p. 339 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Bert Cardullo,Eight Modern Plays: An Archaeology of Western Drama,Hardback,978-1-4438-2278-7,64.99,"Much has been made of the gains of the multicultural reconstruction of the canon of world drama, but what about the works that have been abandoned to make room for the new ones? Eight Modern Plays: An Archaeology of Western Drama brings together eight plays that have been dropped from (or never included in) the major anthologies of world drama over the past ten to twenty years, in order to examine the consequences of the new canonization for our understanding of the development of dramatic form. Those plays are The Thunderstorm (1859), by Alexander Ostrovsky; Engaged (1877), by W. S. Gilbert; The Intruder (1890), by Maurice Maeterlinck; The Weavers (1892), by Gerhart Hauptmann; From Morn to Midnight (1912), by Georg Kaiser; The Magnanimous Cuckold (1921), by Fernand Crommelynck; Awake and Sing! (1935), by Clifford Odets; and The Trial of the Innocents (1950), by Carlo Terron. The recent interpolation of new or recent works into the canon of great dramatic literature, it must be said, has been executed at the cost of knowledge, thereby raising vital questions about the study of theater and drama in the twenty-first century. While other anthologies ostensibly present a comprehensive overview of both the evolution of the Western dramatic tradition and the influences on it from other traditions, these texts in fact often neglect strategic moments (for all the wrong reasons, associated with gender, race, class, and hemisphere) in European theater history. Central to the revision of the canon, for example, has been the devaluation of comedy—particularly farce—as a genre (represented in An Archaeology of Western Drama by one quarter of the plays) and thus the implicit denial of its importance to an understanding of the major dramatic genre of our time, tragicomedy. Key to the revision of the canon, as well, has been not only the exclusion of sentimental comedies and tragedies, but also the exclusion of plays from the Italian Renaissance and from the Romantic movement, not to speak of the reduction of the Russian achievement to a single play by Anton Chekhov. Equally as important, no contemporary play collection acknowledges the fact that modern drama begins, not with Ibsen, but much earlier in Germany with works by Lenz, Kleist, Grabbe, and Hebbel—who themselves were followed by the similarly underrepresented Germans Gerhart Hauptmann and Frank Wedekind. Finally, An Archaeology of Western Drama concludes with a play from the middle of the twentieth century, obviously not because the editor thinks that good plays have not been written since then, but rather because he again wishes to avoid the mistake of other anthologies: irresponsibly to declare a play “great” or aesthetically “representative” before the dust has settled around it, so to speak; or to engage, almost unwittingly, in the selecting of dramas for inclusion on the basis of their current social and political standing. The plays included in An Archaeology of Western Drama reveal a wealth of dramatic material for production as well as the classroom, while the accompanying prefaces explore the importance of each work within the old canon and raise questions about the cultural implications of its exclusion or replacement. As a result, An Archaeology of Western Drama should become an essential complementary or supplemental anthology for theater history, literature, and theory or criticism courses (graduate as well as undergraduate) that seek to conduct a truly comprehensive survey of dramatic form—one that is temporal and geographic in scope as well as artistic. This collection of plays should be of interest, moreover, to any educated person engaged in the debate over what should be studied—and why—in our ever-expanding global culture. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,"Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield and Jack Becker",James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough,Hardback,978-1-4438-2289-3,54.99,"James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough provides the most comprehensive study of the James Bond phenomena ever published. The 40 original essays provide new insights, scholarship, and understanding to the world of James Bond. Topics include the Bond girl, Bond related video games, Ian Fleming’s relationship with the notorious Aleister Crowley and CIA director Alan Dulles. Other articles include Fleming as a character in modern fiction, Bond Jr. comics, the post Fleming novels of John Gardner and Raymond Benson, Bond as an American Superhero, and studies on the music, dance, fashion, and architecture in Bond films. Woody Allen and Peter Sellers as James Bond are also considered, as are Japanese imitation films from the 1960s, the Britishness of Bond, comparisons of Bond to Christian ideals, movie posters and much more. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have contributed a unique collection of perspectives on the world of James Bond and its history. Despite the diversity of viewpoints, the unifying factor is the James Bond mythos. James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough is a much needed contribution to Bond studies and shows how this cultural icon has changed the world. James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough features articles by noted scholars like Professor James Chapman, John Shelton Lawrence, Cynthia J. Miller, Dr. Wesley Britton, Dirk Fowler, Kristen Hunt, Kathrin Dodds, Tom L. McNeely, Claire Hines, Richard B. Spence, Cynthia Walker, Lisa M. Dresner, Andrea Siegel, and David Hopkins among many others. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson,"""Rapt in Secret Studies"": Emerging Shakespeares",Hardback,978-1-4438-2328-9,44.99,"“Rapt in Secret Studies”: Emerging Shakespeares is a collection of new essays in Shakespeare Studies from a generation of scholars presently emerging out of Australia and New Zealand. These 18 essays respond in a myriad of ways to the challenge of Prospero’s phrase from The Tempest, in which he tells his daughter Miranda that in his life before the island he had been “rapt in secret studies”—to an early modern audience, these words were likely to mean much more than a predilection for the black arts, as modern audiences tend to hear in them. Each of the key words used by Prospero evoked a range of meanings in early modern times, to which the emerging scholars represented in this collection responded by imagining new pathways in Shakespeare Studies, a field of study that has in recent times risked being marginalised even within the traditional liberal arts. The “secret studies” of which Prospero speaks are, in fact, more liberal than dark, and so the response by new scholars to a challenge issued by one of Shakespeare’s characters more than four centuries ago has a renewed sense of relevance in the academy today. The essays are divided into three sections, each of which is oriented toward meanings that are specifically associated with one of the key terms in Prospero’s phrase. The “rapt” section has essays concerned with excess in its various forms—jealousy, obsession, sex, violence, and even death—as well as with travel and its impact on ways of knowing about the world. In the “secret” section, the nature of things about which the early modern could scarcely speak are taken into consideration, with essays on prevailing early modern myths, infidelities, stillborn children, contagion, and the instruments of secrecy such as gossip and spies. Finally, in the “study” section, essays cover issues related both to early modern textual practice—the use of historical source materials in Shakespeare’s writing, questions of multiple authorship, and the issue of early modern style and kinds of drama—and to more modern scholarly practice, such as the role of Shakespeare in the New Bibliography and the New Historicism. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso,"Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives",Hardback,978-1-4438-2283-1,39.99,"During the past one hundred years or so, the depiction of traumatic historical events and experiences has been a recurrent theme in the work of artists and media professionals—including those in literature, theatre, visual art, architecture, cinema, and television—among other forms of cultural expression and social communication. The essays collected in this book follow a contemporary critical trend in the field of trauma studies that reflects comparatively on artistic and media representations of traumatic histories and experiences from countries around the world. Focusing on a diversity of art and media forms—including memorials, literature, visual and installation art, music, video, film, and journalism—they both apply dominant theories of trauma and explore the former’s limitations while bearing in mind other possible methodologies. Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives contributes to a critical trauma studies, a field that reinvigorates itself in the twenty-first century through its constant reassessment of the relationship between theory, representation, and global histories of violence and suffering. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,JoAnne C. Juett and David Jones,Coming Out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century,Hardback,978-1-4438-2379-1,39.99,"Coming Out to the Mainstream is a collection of essays written from a range of perspectives, from scholars to film producers, who seek to contextualize and reframe New Queer Cinema from a 21st century perspective—decades after Stonewall, the emergence of the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the initial years of the gay marriage movement. These essays situate themselves in the 21st century as an attempt to assess what appears to be a mainstreaming of New Queer Cinema, a current wave of New Queer Cinema film that holds potential for influencing film viewers beyond the original limits of an independent film audience, critics, and the academy. Specifically, these essays examine whether and how the filmmaking styles and themes of New Queer Cinema have been mainstreamed—rendered familiar as points of interest in popular culture of the 21st century, challenging a queer-phobic cultural climate, and providing an incisive set of visual representations that can help inform continuing debates over queerness in public culture. For instance, what do we make of the burgeoning number of queer stories that are circulating not just in arthouses but in mainstream media? How much of a transformation in our collective sensibilities does this trend represent, and will it carry us toward a cultural landscape where identity is commonly understood and valued as multiple, fluid, and performative? While the editors of this collection find there is significant evidence that New Queer Cinema has achieved success in forging greater mainstream acceptance of queer perspectives in cinema and everyday culture, the essays we present offer a variety of voices, a timely set of observations on queer images in film, television, and popular culture. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Elizabeth Graham,Meanings of Ripley: The Alien Quadrilogy and Gender,Hardback,978-1-4438-2339-5,39.99,"Ellen Ripley of the Alien Quadrilogy has become an iconic female figure in the male dominated genre of science fiction/action/horror since her first appearance in 1979. This collection offers readers varied interpretations of Ripley that are grounded in the social context and theoretical perspectives that were dominant prior to and during the time the films were released. Specifically, the rise of Second Wave Feminism—and the backlash against it—provides a backdrop for this collection. Is Ripley a feminist hero? A patriarchal woman and mother? Does she embody de Beavoir’s “myth of the feminine”? Does she exhibit sexual agency? Does she offer us a glimpse of individual autonomy that moves away from dichotomous gender roles? These are the primary questions explored in this collection. While the focus is clearly on Ripley, the arguments go beyond the confines of the films by examining the relationship between the individual and society in which both are product and producer of the other, and illustrate that social artifacts such as film can provide insights into the lived experiences of our world. The contributors come from a variety of backgrounds including Literature, Cinema Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Theatre History, and reside in Canada and the United States. They represent a range from junior to senior scholars. While science fiction is clearly an interest of all these individuals, it is not the primary area of research for most of them. By bringing voices from multiple disciplines into the discussion about Ripley, this collection offers readers perspectives that deviate from and yet complement the current trend in film criticism and, thus, contributes to opening up discussions about such characters and the genre to a wider audience. ","“The success of the Alien series in the 1980s and 90s started a renaissance in the production of artistically ambitious science fiction movies by major Hollywood studios. In this anthology, authors from a variety of disciplines look past the fight scenes and expensive visual effects to the true source of the films’ enduring popularity: the enigmatic figure of Ellen Ripley. Their contributions provide valuable insights into Ripley’s status as an autonomous agent, her significance as a feminist icon, and her ambiguous relationship with the monstrous aliens themselves. For movie buffs, students of contemporary popular culture, and scholars who love science fiction, this book should serve as an indispensable companion to the films.” —Mark Silcox, PhD Assistant Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Myron Stagman,Shakespeare’s Double-Dealing Comedies: Deciphering the “Problem Plays”,Paperback,978-1-4438-2388-3,19.99,"Are some of Shakespeare’s romantic storybook heroines actually emoting sexually obscene (but very funny) lines? {“Sexual quibbles (puns, play-on words), covertly uttered by precious-and-pure heroines, call for an immediate revision of viewpoint.”} When Fernando (The Tempest) is described as bravely swimming for shore “in lusty stroke”, would he be disqualified for doing this in Olympic competition? Before the walls of Harfleur, when Henry V threatens to “mow like grass your fresh-fair virgins” and have “your naked infants spitted upon pikes”, is he (and by inference his creator) barbarous? Or is he doing an hilarious comic imitation of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine before the walls of Damascus? {“There exists an interesting Marlovian source for the Tamburlaine protagonist himself—Ivan the Terrible. He proposed marriage to Queen Elizabeth, who tactfully turned him down.”} Rule Number 1: If a good writer seems surprisingly inept and has been known to be a wit or humorist, suspect parody or satire. Well, esteemed readers, you decide where to place your bets. On the critics? Or on William Shakespeare? ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Antonis K. Petrides and Sophia Papaioannou,New Perspectives on Postclassical Comedy,Hardback,978-1-4438-2411-8,39.99,"PIERIDES II, Series Editors: Philip Hardie and Stratis Kyriakidis The re-emergence of Menander from the landfills of Egypt in the late-19th century and the subsequent discovery of the Bodmer Codex in the 1950s caused a sensation among scholars. After a period in which the primary editing and reconstruction of the substantially preserved plays and fragments was the main line of criticism, scholars were finally in a position to take a deep breath and look at Menander and New Comedy, both Greek and Roman, in wider contexts of interpretation and with fresh perspectives drawn from innovative work both in Classical and more modern studies. This book aims to showcase these new approaches to postclassical comedy. The individual contributions, six in total, approach New Comedy as theatrical performance, but also as a dynamic player in the socio-political discourses of the polis culture that gave birth to it. The chapters highlight continuities as well as discontinuities with the cultural and literary past of Athens and the Greek world, but mostly emphasise the progressiveness of New Comedy as a genre and its importance for the nascent culture of Hellenism and Rome thereafter. Blume’s introductory chapter tells the story of Menander’s re-emergence from the tenebrae in full detail. The other five chapters are dual in nature: expositional of a method, but also practical examples of it. They are arranged in a fashion which underlines the major theoretical underpinnings of New Comedy studies, as they are being developed in the present: Cultural Studies (David Konstan and Susan Lape), Intertextuality and Performance (Antonis K. Petrides and Rosanna Omitowoju), and Reception in Rome (Sophia Papaioannou). ","This impressive, well-documented essay is worth alone the price of the book for a wide variety of scholarly readers or their libraries. Richard F Hardin The University of Kansas 2011 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Miriam Ross,"South American Cinematic Culture: Policy, Production, Distribution and Exhibition",Hardback,978-1-4438-2483-5,39.99,"This study of South American cinema offers a new way of approaching the variety of films available in the region. It brings to light the interconnectivity between state-run institutions (film councils, cinemateques, archives), altruistic bodies (film festival funds, NGOs) and commercial organisations (production companies, exhibitors and distributors). Examples of filmmakers, policy initiatives, funding sources and alternative film networks combine to produce a rich overview of one of the most significant sites for non-Western filmmaking in the twenty-first century. There is an awareness of the place South American cinema has on the international stage and, for this reason, the study involves an in depth look at the way film products are circulated within national boundaries and through external global circuits. Drawing on scholarship from studies on Latin American culture, cultural policy, indigeneity, digital technology, globalisation, transculturation and the public sphere, new links are traced between the various fields. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,James Combs,Wit's End: Making Sense of the Great Movies,Hardback,978-1-4438-2426-2,44.99,"This book is a study of the “Great Movies,” that fluid category of feature films deemed by various authorities—film societies, critics, academics, and movie enthusiasts—to be the enduring and memorable works of cinematic history. But what are they about? In Wit’s End, the author attempts to “make sense” of these films in order to understand their greatness in the context of their relation to other films and to the worlds they come from and recreate on screen. To that end, we employ the conceptual power of pragmatic social theory and the rich idea of aesthesis to explore and arrange these films as a means of understanding what they express about the universality of human life in our keen use of wit, organization of social wont, and direction of cultural way. It is hoped that such an inquiry will illuminate the glory of the great films and contribute to the advance of film studies. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-12-01,Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen,Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives,Hardback,978-1-4438-2575-7,39.99,"Mutual borrowing, fluid transactions and transformations of performances and performers have a long and enduring history in Southeast Asia, but this trend has been heightened and made more vivid in the contemporary period. The omnipresence of global communications has provoked and inspired yet more novel experiments and collaborations between cosmopolitan artists and globally-oriented performers. This volume offers vital insights into recent developments in Southeast Asian performance. It demonstrates the ways in which contemporary artists and performers are increasingly working betwixt the traditional boundaries of the nation and discourses of identity. The essays collected here are testament to ongoing conversations and relations among scholars, practitioners and scholar-practitioners in Southeast Asia and around the world. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Kathleen McDonald,Americanization of History: Conflation of Time and Culture in Film and Television,Hardback,978-1-4438-2579-5,44.99,"This collection of essays searches for how history and literature translate into filmic texts that then reflect the time and place of the translation. Major motion pictures as well as television movies and series are the sites of this exploration. The opening essay surveys what films tell us it means to be set in a medieval time, while the second looks at one of the most powerful movie studios since the earliest days of movie-making, Walt Disney Studios. The second section investigates classic Americana by delving specifically into the hegemonic power of Walt Disney Studios, by considering the union between the American pastime of baseball and the great white way of Broadway, and by discovering the constantly morphing relationship of the icons of the Wild West. Section three looks at characters living outside of roles considered socially appropriate in their world: vampire slayers, mobsters, and those with multiple personalities. The fourth section studies how present-day mores of power and beauty control revisions of historically-based stories through issues of vengeance, race, sexuality, and the notion of beauty itself. The final section takes up the question of what it means to historicize the present moment, and analyzes the current period via a very popular and long-running show’s depiction of sexuality as accepted or rejected within a paradigm that appears not merely to tolerate, but actively to promote, deviance. The last essay questions the very concepts of time and history themselves. The articles do not reach one conclusion regarding this topic, but instead provide a variety of perspectives which help to theorize the issue for the discerning reader. ","“The essays collected here offer important new perspectives on the appropriation of history in contemporary media. The contributors skillfully explore recent reshapings of historical narratives in cultural artifacts imbued with American assumptions about gender, nostalgia, ethnicity, and war. The result is a fascinating, disturbing assessment of the state of historical knowledge in today’s mass audiences.” —Christopher Morris, Author of The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2002) “Most educated Americans today understand, and perhaps bemoan, that our nation grasps its own history often through its literature and popular culture. This new anthology, adroitly edited by Kathleen McDonald, helps its mainly academic audience to better understand, and thus to better communicate to its students, just how popular heroes like Mad Men’s ‘Don Draper’ flee society in the footsteps of ‘Huck Finn;’ how adventurous young women like Vampire Slaying ‘Buffy,’ in the mode of Richardson’s ‘Pamela,’ are rendered impotent by the realization of sexual desire; and, overall, how films that are set in earlier, more peaceful and happy times (Take Me Out to the Ball Game) actually more pointedly critique the conflicted eras in which they are made.” —Terry Barr, Professor of English and Director of the Media Studies Program, Presbyterian College, South Carolina, USA “This collection transcends familiar notions of ‘fidelity’ to ask profoundly important questions about Hollywood’s frequently spurious representations of history. Even when the authors’ interpretations seem debatable, their insights are invariably provocative and enlightening. Scholars, students, and casual movie buffs alike will find Americanization of History a compelling read.” —Joseph P. Moser, Professor of English and Film Studies, Fitchburg State University, Massachusetts, USA ""Kathleen Mcdonald's collection offers a rich study of the refraction of history through popular film and television. The Americanization of History gives thoughtful answers to worthwhile questions."" Rhonda V. Wilcox, Norwhich University, November 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Colleen Ryan and Nicoletta Marini-Maio,"Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures through Theater—Theoretical Approaches and Classroom Practices",Hardback,978-1-4438-2650-1,49.99,"Dramatic Interactions is a collection of essays on the flourishing and interdisciplinary subject of teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures through theater. With rich examples from a variety of commonly and less commonly taught languages, this book affirms both the relevance and effectiveness of using theater for foreign language learning in the most comprehensive sense of the term. It includes innovative approaches to specific theatrical texts and addresses numerous aspects of foreign language learning such as oral proficiency and communication, intercultural competence, the role of affect and motivation in foreign language study, multiple literacies, regional variations and dialect, literary analysis and adaptation, and the overall liberating effects of verbal and non-verbal self-expression in the foreign language. Dramatic Interactions renders accessible, efficacious, and enjoyable the study of languages, literatures, and cultures through theater with the hope of inspiring and facilitating the greater incorporation of theatrical texts and techniques in foreign language courses at every level. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Josep M. Armengol,Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-2630-3,34.99,"Comprising seven different chapters, the collection Men in Color attempts to analyze, and revisit, the representation of ethnic masculinities, both white and non-white, in and through contemporary U.S. literature and cinema. If most of the existing studies on masculinity and race have centered on one specific model of racialized masculinities, Men in Color attempts to provide an introductory perspective on different racialized masculinities simultaneously, including African American, Asian American, Chicano, Arab American, and also white masculinity, which is analyzed as another ethnic and gendered construct, rather than as a paradigm of normalcy and “universality.” By exploring several ethnic masculinities in relation to each other, the present volume aims to highlight both the differences and the similarities between different patterns of masculinity, showing how, even as gender is inflected by race, certain aspects or features of masculinity remain unchanged across the ethnic board. Ultimately, the volume as a whole illustrates both the changing nature of masculinities as well as the recurrence of certain stereotypes, such as the hypersexualization and/or the feminization of ethnic males, which recur in and across several ethnicities. The constant tension and intersection between gender and race is the subject of this book, which hopes to contribute some notes and reflections on ethnic masculinities to the much more complex and larger discussion about gender and racial identities in our increasingly multicultural and globalized 21st-century world. ","“With his keen eye for diversity, texture and nuance, Josep Armengol has assembled here a rich selection of essays on contemporary depictions of American masculinities, white and non-white, in literature, film and other cultural media. Men in Color provides an invaluable resource for reflecting on the differences and the similarities between apparently very distinct patterns of masculinity, highlighting the perennial tension between gender, race and ethnicity in men’s battle for manhood.” —Lynne Segal, Birkbeck College, University of London; Author of Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men “This is just the kind of collection we need in gender studies these days: each chapter contains a close reading of particular authors or texts, but each is so carefully grounded in gender studies theory that the collection adds up to a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Wise and judicious editing creates a coherent whole out of these disparate strands.” —Michael Kimmel, Editor of Men and Masculinities ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-02-01,Steven N. Lipkin,Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films based on True Stories,Hardback,978-1-4438-2682-2,34.99,"Docudramas, films and movies-of-the-week based on true stories, offer their audiences performance as persuasion. As docudramas re-create actual people and events, these works perform their material. The premises of docudramas’ persuasive arguments operate within the basic settings that stage performances of noteworthy events, the events of war, and the lives of noteworthy individuals. In performing the past, docudramas offer us a performance of memory. Through docudramatic performance, the memories of others become ours. The performance of memory roots docudramatic representation in actuality, and indicates the responsibility to serve the past that helps make docudrama a distinctive mode of representation. The spirit of obligation to the past also frames the ethical considerations docudrama raises, as performance in docudrama shapes public memory. Docudrama Performs the Past examines the spectrum of arguments docudramas offer as their re-creations reason from the arenas of events such as the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93, wars ranging from World War II to Iraq, and the lives of actors, athletes, and politicians. The case studies developed in each chapter show how docudrama’s re-creation of “true stories,” its performance of memory, warrants the claims it forwards about how to remember the past. The aggregate of examining works made since the late 1990s allows us to see how, as recurring contexts, the arenas of docudramatic argument ground action and identity in the settings that frame performance, structure the moral value of the contestation that ensues, and shape the public memory of the past that docudramas perform. ","""Using case studies for his basic material, Stephen Lipkin's 'Docudrama Performs the Past' is a brilliant survey of the rationale, theory and practice of current docudrama on film and TV. This book is a 'must' for anyone interested in the place of this increasingly popular genre in modern media."" Professor Alan Rosenthal, The Communicatiosn Dept., the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ""I hae known Steven Lipkin's work for over ten years, and I regard him as one of the foremost international scholars on the subject of screen docudrama. His writing is unfailingly intelligent, lucid and informative, his appreciation for an often undervalued genre inspirational. Any student who wants to know about this controversial but indispensable hybrid form can do no better than read Lipkin's work."" Dr. Derek Paget, Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, October 2010 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-03-01,Michael Berman and Rohit Dalvi,"Heroes, Monsters and Values: Science Fiction Films of the 1970s",Hardback,978-1-4438-2692-1,39.99,"This exciting new anthology brings together many diverse views on blockbuster and cult science fiction films of the 1970s. These essays, which range in focus from Alien to Zardoz, explore some of the most fundamental questions about the meaning of being human. The chapters of the first section challenge our notions of heroism, confronting our ideas with issues of history, gender and embodiment. The second section’s contributions delve into the human caused monstrosities of our own ingenuity and curiosity whereby our technology transforms the human into a source of horror. The anthology’s final section is a chorus that speaks to the cinematic depictions that disrupt our religious and moral assumptions. The international group of contributors have produced a surprising, entertaining and enlightening work that will appeal to both science fiction and film enthusiasts the world over. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-04-01,"Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Raz Yosef and Anat Zanger Associate Editor Gal Raz",Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic,Hardback,978-1-4438-2845-1,39.99,"Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic charts current developments within the field of ethics and the role it plays in the study of moving images. It is the first collection of essays of its kind that brings together articles by film and media scholars from three continents, and provides multiple points of engagement of film with present and past histories, politics, myth making, and with core aspects of human subjectivity. The essays cover a wide range of topics, such as the European Union; Europe during World War II and after; film genres; the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; early American history, and recent catastrophic events. The collection includes an introductory chapter by Thomas Elsaesser as well as chapters by Kristian Feigelson, Régine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, Anton Kaes, Gertrud Koch, Odeya Kohen-Raz, Lihi Nagler, Judd Ne’eman, Bill Nichols, and Janet Walker. The contributors offer different approaches to the issue of film and ethics and ask whether there are specific characteristics of the moving image, or of film scholarship, that relate to ethical issues; and how discussing the engagement of both narrative and documentary film with representations of the Other, trauma, terrorism, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict may contribute to the re-shaping of past and current thoughts on these subjects. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-04-01,Archana Verma,"Performance and Culture: Narrative, Image and Enactment in India",Hardback,978-1-4438-2735-5,34.99,"This book deals with various aspects of performance in India; especially that related to dance and dance-drama. Rather than being a description of the various dance forms of India, it attempts to discuss the social equations and cultural ideas that a performance attempts to portray. In this sense, a performance is a narrative. At the same time, performances also deal with well-known narratives from the religious traditions of India, often redefining and recounting them in the process of performance. A study of these aspects is important to understand the kind of equations that define these discourses on the performance narratives. Chapter I shows the different forms of dances that are described in the iconographic canons and also the famous dance treatise the Natyashastra, correlating them with the sculptures of dance available in the temples. Here, the temples of south India datable to 6th- 13th centuries have been studied for this purpose. Attempt is made to study the gender equations that are expounded through these dance images and texts, as also the correlation between the audience and the performance and how these ideas are intertwined with the religious images. Chapter II deals with four Sanskrit burlesque plays written in the ancient period, which reverse social equations and classical dramatic representations through the genre of satire. Almost every elite-class person, generally idealized in the classical Sanskrit plays, is lampooned here. Issues of audience perception and the reception of this kind of reversed images of the ideal figures of the society are discussed in this chapter. Chapter III deals with the aesthetics of eroticism that form the basis of many Indian classical dances, how they are intertwined with the notion of devotionalism in Hinduism and how they are negotiated in the Indian classical dances in our contemporary period. A case study is done here of Odissi, the classical dance from the eastern state of Orissa, which draws extensively from the temple sculptures of dance. Chapter IV shows that sacred narrative in India is not always a means of glorifying the divine. Rather, sometimes it is also used to satirize the established notions of religiosity and of divinity. This forms the basis of this very interesting semi-classical dance-drama form called Ottan Thullal from the southern state of Kerala. Kathakali, the classical dance-drama and Mohiniattam, the classical dance from Kerala have dominated the scene so much that this form of dance-drama has been overshadowed and it is little known to the world outside Kerala, even in India. There is not much scholarship on Ottan Thullal. This chapter deals with this form and the manner in which it uses the idiom of satire to narrate the religious legends. Chapter V is a study of the Mithila narratives from the eastern region of Mithila in Bihar to understand the ways in which gender equations in the Mithila society influence the making of these narratives. There is a discussion of the nature of “folk narratives” in this chapter. Chapter VI takes some folk forms of performance and visual narratives from different states of India to show how social equations such as power hierarchy, gender and caste dimensions are negotiated. All these use the traditional religious space to work out these equations. Chapter VII on one hand is a comparative study of two Hindi films made in 1960s, based on the lives of two women dancers from ancient India. One of them is a historical figure and the other is a figure. On the other hand, this is an attempt o show how the narratives of these women dancers are remodeled in literary as well as the cinematic medium, every time these narratives are retold. Effort is made to show how the cultural memory of the ancient history of India that the modern narrators of these stories have been received as a process of acculturation, which influences this recasting of narratives in literature as well as in film. It is also shown that this process of narration through cultural memory is not a new phenomenon, since it occurred even in the ancient period when narrative was being remodeled to present in a new form before the audience. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-05-01,John Matthews and David Torevell,A Life of Ethics and Performance,Hardback,978-1-4438-2871-0,34.99,"Ethics is, in an important sense, a matter of ‘being good’ but it is also a question about how to live a ‘good life’. This book's emphasis on the theatrical and performative and their relationship to ethics, highlights that being good is, a matter of acting good and that acting good is a question of performing (or not-performing) certain roles and duties. This book surveys the most recent work in the field of ethics and performance, organizing this research through the metaphor of ‘the good life’. Each chapter explores a question about what it means to ‘act good’ at a different point in life and thus the book moves from natality to fatality, and beyond in its meditation on the relationship between performance and life itself. In this, it offers an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the relationship between ethics, theatre and performance studies. ","“Ethics meets performance in a highly imaginative and innovative way here. This is a set of very stimulating and captivating essays and the book engages with you on every level right to the last page. New questions are being explored; a new discipline is emerging. This is a book that changes the way you look at the world.” —Dr. Ian Markham, Professor of Theology and Ethics and President of Virginia Theological Seminary, USA ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-05-01,Catriona McAra and David Calvin,Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment,Hardback,978-1-4438-2869-7,44.99,"The anti-(fairy) tale has long existed in the shadow of the traditional fairy tale as its flipside or evil twin. According to André Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930), such Antimärchen are contemporaneous with some of the earliest known oral variants of familiar tales. While fairy tales are generally characterised by a “spirit of optimism” (Tolkien) the anti-tale offers us no such assurances; for every “happily ever after,” there is a dissenting “they all died horribly.” The anti-tale is, however, rarely an outright opposition to the traditional form itself. Inasmuch as the anti-hero is not a villain, but may possess attributes of the hero, the anti-tale appropriates aspects of the fairy tale form, (and its equivalent genres) and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirises elements of these to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. In this collection, Little Red Riding Hood retaliates against the wolf, Cinderella’s stepmother provides her own account of events, and “Snow White” evolves into a postmodern vampire tale. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, revealing the underlying structures, dynamics, fractures and contradictions within the borrowed tales. Over the last half century, this dissident tradition has become increasingly popular, inspiring numerous writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers. Although anti-tales abound in contemporary art and popular culture, the term has been used sporadically in scholarship without being developed or defined. While it is clear that the aesthetics of postmodernism have provided fertile creative grounds for this tradition, the anti-tale is not just a postmodern phenomenon; rather, the “postmodern fairy tale” is only part of the picture. Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, this collection of twenty-two essays and artwork explores various manifestations of the anti-tale, from the ancient to the modern including romanticism, realism and surrealism along the way. ","“Books like Anti-Tales are important, taking a cold look at the complex, often dark affect at fairy tales and broadening the contemporary lens onto theories about their appearances in art, literature, film. The idea of anti-tale has been so important to me, and I’m delighted to see this volume enter the conversation and whisper its fragments of spells. The fairy tale is real; long live the anti-fairy-tale.” —Kate Bernheimer, author of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold and editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales “This valuable collection of essays, oriented around the idea of the ‘anti-tale,’ offers a much needed formal as well as analytic focus on the dark side of the fairy-tale genre.” —Professor Aidan Day, University of Dundee “The essays in this collection discuss an abundance of anti-tales from literature, film and art. Retellings, reimaginings and new tales from across centuries and around the world are all explored in relation to the critical term ‘anti-tale,’ uncovering new paths through the forest. Where the fairy tale leaves us with answers the anti-tale leaves us with questions and Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment is a valuable text for scholars, readers and writers who wish to engage with this wonderfully subversive form.” —Claire Massey, Editor of New Fairy Tales ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-05-01,Ágnes Pethő,Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between,Hardback,978-1-4438-2879-6,54.99,"Within the last two decades “intermediality” has emerged as one of the most challenging concepts in media theory with no shortage of various taxonomies and definitions. What prompted the writing of the essays gathered in this volume, however, was not a desire for more classifications applied to the world of moving pictures, but a strong urge to investigate what the “inter-” implied by the idea of “intermediality” stands for, and what it actually entails in the cinema. The book offers in each of the individual chapters a cross-section view of specific instances in which cinema seems to consciously position itself “in-between” media and arts, employing techniques that tap into the multimedial complexity of cinema, and bring into play the tensions generated by media differences. The introductory theoretical writings deal with the historiography of approaching intermedial phenomena in cinema presenting at the same time some of the possible “gateways” that can open up the cinematic image towards the perceptual frames of other media and arts. The book also contains essays that examine more closely specific paradigms in the poetics of cinematic intermediality, like the allure of painting in Hitchcock’s films, the exquisite ways of framing and un-framing haptical imagery in Antonioni’s works, the narrative allegories of media differences, the word and image plays and ekphrastic techniques in Jean-Luc Godard’s “total” cinema, the flâneuristic intermedial gallery of moving images created by José Luis Guerín, or the types of intermedial metalepses in Agnès Varda’s “cinécriture.” From a theoretical vantage point these essays break with the tradition of thinking of intermediality in analogy with intertextuality and attempt a phenomenological (re)definition of intermedial relations. Moreover, some of the analyses target films that expose the coexistence of the hypermediated experience of intermediality and the illusion of reality, connecting the questions of intermediality both to the indexical nature of cinematic representation and to the specific ideological and cultural context of the films, thus offering insights into a few questions regarding the “politics” of intermediality as well. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-05-01,"Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield and Jack Becker","James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough, Second Edition",Hardback,978-1-4438-2867-3,54.99,"James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough provides the most comprehensive study of the James Bond phenomena ever published. The 40 original essays provide new insights, scholarship, and understanding to the world of James Bond. Topics include the Bond girl, Bond related video games, Ian Fleming’s relationship with the notorious Aleister Crowley and CIA director Alan Dulles. Other articles include Fleming as a character in modern fiction, Bond Jr. comics, the post Fleming novels of John Gardner and Raymond Benson, Bond as an American Superhero, and studies on the music, dance, fashion, and architecture in Bond films. Woody Allen and Peter Sellers as James Bond are also considered, as are Japanese imitation films from the 1960s, the Britishness of Bond, comparisons of Bond to Christian ideals, movie posters and much more. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines have contributed a unique collection of perspectives on the world of James Bond and its history. Despite the diversity of viewpoints, the unifying factor is the James Bond mythos. James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films are Not Enough is a much needed contribution to Bond studies and shows how this cultural icon has changed the world. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-05-01,Samuele Grassi,Looking Through Gender: Post-1980 British and Irish Drama,Hardback,978-1-4438-2873-4,39.99,"This contribution to Theatre Studies explores the shaping and performing of gender identity in British and Irish theatres since the 1980s. It highlights contact zones, conflict areas, and divergencies between the two theatre contexts with reference to historic, socio-political, and cultural clusters. Largely from a queer theory standpoint, this book reads several plays in their attempt to unmask exploiting mechanisms of sexuality and gender regulation. It focuses on alternative notions of sociality, shared spaces, and bodies, and offers political suggestions in order to resist confining notions of identity and gender. ","“Dr Grassi draws extensively from debates carried out by contemporary theorists in support of the political implication of his volume. A cutting-edge and much needed record of key plays from a queer-theory perspective, the book undermines the foundation of debates concepts like gender essentialism, power and ‘the political.’” —Dr Fiorenzo Fantaccini, University of Florence “Samuele Grassi is adept at expanding an engagement with queer theory into wider cultural and political contexts. While he chooses to work with current theory, that approach is well integrated with shrewd and original social perceptions, with a concern for historical changes as informing influences on creativity and with a genuine understanding of dramaturgy and the ways in which ideas may be shaped into performance. It is the complexity of his engagement with gender issues and his ability to trace subtle discriminations between Irish and English cultural expression of such issues that continually impress one in reading Dr. Grassi’s study.” —Prof. Richard Cave (Royal Holloway) ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-06-01,Michael Tawa,Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture,Paperback,978-1-4438-2942-7,24.99,"Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture aims to explore parallel approaches to the conceptualisation and composition of place, space, time, materiality and narrative in cinematographic and architectural practices. Beyond drawing useful implications for design, the book investigates a range of themes to mobilise a reconsideration of cinema and architecture as non-representational practices. It suggests that films and buildings can be read and designed as assemblages not directed to the formal expression of meaning, but to the framing of strategic and enabling conditions of emergent sense, realised within the tectonic and material conditions of the cinematic and the architectural as such. Succinct analyses of precedents in film, music, painting and architecture are used to foreground tectonic and compositional characteristics related to spatiality, temporality and narrative that are transferable across disciplines and practices. The thematic framework of the book engages theoretical material by Heidegger, Simondon, Deleuze, Nancy, Agamben and Stiegler. Classical modernist and postmodernist films by Dreyer, Antonioni, Hitchcock, Godard, Paradjanov, Tarkovski, Herzog, Lynch and Heneke are analysed side by side with important traditional, modernist and contemporary buildings, including works by Corbusier, Scarpa, Lewerentz, Zumthor and Markli. Illustrated with drawings and photographs by the author, this book should be of interest to practitioners and students of art, design, cinema and the built environment who wish to expand the creative scope and resonance of their work. ","“In this elegant, erudite work, Michael Tawa traces the points of intersection and difference between architecture and cinema, touching on the materiality of space, time, light and sound – how they are experienced, held in our memories, and reactivated. With great sensitivity and originality Professor Tawa draws on a range of theoretical perspectives offered by Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and Nancy, amongst others, putting them to work in his analysis of the built environment and cinema. Arguing that it is often the more discordant elements between disciplines that produce the most productive resonances, the reader is invited to imagine possibilities for enacting new opportunities for thinking, experiencing and making. It is for this reason that Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture, provides such a valuable resource for emerging and established artists, architects and filmmakers, as well as a broader, critically engaged, reading audience.” – Dr Elizabeth Presa, Head of The Centre for Ideas, Victoria College of Art, The University of Melbourne “From my own philosophical perspective, Michael Tawa’s work presents a double interest which at the same time situates it at the heart of our fin de siècle contemporary theory: 1) On the one hand, an interest at the level of sense (sense and not meaning), which constitutes, as we know, an acute question for our late modernity threatened by nihilism (or the negation of sense): by proposing the project of a ‘design lexicon’ which goes beyond all technical or thematic dictionaries, he aims to renew and displace the entire field of architectural reflection, firstly by the choice of terms, then by the treatment of their semantic, etymological, evocative or suggestive values. . . . 2) On the other hand, an interest as the question of being-in-common, that is to say the question of pre-political, pre-social plurality (or else beyond the social and political maybe) that makes of us (human beings, but also all beings) beings-with as essentially as they are, each one and in groups, singular beings. . . . Hence the double form of this research – significance of design and design of place, questions of place for sense – engages a resolutely active and practical thinking, a philosophy in action of design as that which traces sense or possibilities of sense. This thinking, which it seems to me takes up again the most fundamental vocation of architecture, appears perfectly adapted to the formation of architects, urbanists and landscape architects. . . . Michael Tawa rests his work on very solid and broad knowledge of the great contemporary philosophical currents, as well as the artistic and ethical givens and sensibilities of a world in whose diversity he moves with great ease of discourse and design, engaging concepts, words, images or tonalities from all sorts of traditions and cultural settings.” – Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosopher “Michael Tawa’s writing moves between architecture and film, producing unexpected resonances in the reader. This is a book for creative designers, who will find themselves absorbed in arguments and informed by erudition, but the real point of the reading will be for the effect it will have on the reader's world. Things that passed unnoticed will come into focus. By dwelling on acutely observed moments in films and buildings, Tawa evokes the special qualities that make them memorable, and shows their rapports with one another. Buildings house everyday activities, and films often show us things that are not in themselves remarkable, but with careful juxtaposition, a memory or a shadow, dripping water or brute stone can evoke a sense of something much more deeply interfused. One comes away from the text wanting to act on intuitions that were previously dormant, but which have been gently roused and turn out to have a life of their own.” – Andrew Ballantyne, Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-06-01,"Michaël Abecassis, Gudrun Ledegen and Karen Zouaoui",La francophonie ou l’éloge de la diversité,Hardback,978-1-4438-2934-2,39.99,"The first part of this volume, La Francophonie ou l'éloge de la diversité, is devoted to “Francophone cinema, between Bollywood and Hollywood.” What in particular does Francophone cinema have to offer compared with American or Indian cinema? What more does Francophone cinema have to offer? What genres does it prefer? For what audience? The second part deals with the promotion of diversity in Francophone countries, taking into consideration the cultural aspects of Francophonie in the 21st century, the linguistic description of systems in contact, tracing the historical stages which have led to the creation of this locus of cultural diversity, and focusing finally on university cooperation and Franco-British scientific research. This book brings together contributions by outstanding authors who gathered in Oxford in October 2010 at the Maison française, including: Louis-Jean Calvet: Professor at the University of Provence. In collaboration with the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, he works on language policy, particularly the struggle to maintain linguistic diversity. Bernard Cerquiglini: Rector of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. An eminent linguist and specialist on the French language, Bernard Cerquiglini is known as the “Professor” from TV5 Monde’s Merci Professeur! Philippe Lane is the Cultural Attaché at the French Embassy in London. Gudrun Ledegen: Sociolinguist, Lecturer in Linguistics at the Université de la Réunion. She specialises in contact between French and Creole in La Réunion. The discussion is complemented by contributions by Maryse Bray, Karine Chevalier, Anne-Caroline Fiévet, Hélène Gill, Amélie Hien, Gaëlle Planchenault and Alena Podhorná-Polická. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-07-01,Flannery Wilson and Jane Ramey Correia,"Intermingled Fascinations: Migration, Displacement and Translation in World Cinema",Hardback,978-1-4438-2954-0,34.99,"This collection of essays seeks to expand and refine the study of Sinophone and Franco-Japanese transnational cinema. Chapter by chapter, each author writes about two or three transnational films (and the characters within those films) that highlight issues related to migration, exile, and imprisonment. The essays are connected by themes of displacement, liminality, and (mis)communication. Overall, this anthology seeks to demonstrate that in-depth cinematic analysis is key to understanding filmic representations of diasporic and displaced communities in modern Mainland China and Japan. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-07-01,Eduardo R. Infante,Researching Work-Family Discourses: Step-by-Step Audiovisual Analysis of the British Sitcom Only Fools and Horses (1981-2003),Hardback,978-1-4438-2975-5,39.99,"Gender talk and work-family issues have enticed many researchers worldwide in their wish to provide key insights into the globalised burden of balancing work-family demands. However, most studies follow the traditional quantitative methodology which fails to embrace the complexity of these issues. The present book is aimed to cover this gap by researching work-family discourses also with qualitative methodologies based on social representations of work, family, and gender roles. The book details the process step-by-step, with the hazardous duty of unveiling the hidden social messages of androcentric worlds towards defining degenderised societies in androgynous terms. Notwithstanding its complexity, the work-family discourses are retrieved from British best awarded TV sitcom Only Fools and Horses. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-07-01,Evgenija Garbolevsky,The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945-89,Hardback,978-1-4438-2970-0,39.99,"The complexities and paradoxes of the Bulgarian film industry during the era of Communist rule (1945–1989) are explored in The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945–89. This influential industry was mobilized for the needs of the state. During its creation and development, cultural institutions and those involved in film production operated within a relatively closed system, based on rewards and punishments imposed by the Communist bureaucratic apparatus. Sub-textual content in films produced in Bulgaria during this period highlights the attitude of the elite towards the regime. Understanding this multifaceted relationship helps explain why so many intellectuals found the film industry to be an attractive field in which to work, and decided to remain loyal to the regime instead of leaving or openly rebelling against it. This work challenges the historiographical perception that the arts in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War were largely unsuccessful vehicles of propaganda and dissent. By using a comparative methodological approach, the cinema arts in the East and West are shown following similar paths despite the “Iron Curtain.” ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-08-01,Katy Shaw,Analysing David Peace,Hardback,978-1-4438-2990-8,34.99,"Analysing David Peace provides an exciting, challenging and accessible critical introduction to the work of contemporary British novelist David Peace. Through a detailed analysis of his writings, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of their production and dissemination, the collection explores Peace’s attempts to capture the sensibilities of late twentieth century society and contributes to an ongoing debate in the media about his representations. Peace is an emerging author who is widely read and taught and whose novels are increasingly celebrated. In the past decade Peace has won the James Tait Black Memorial Award and was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. The four novels of his Red Riding Quartet interrogate British society of the 1970s/80s through the prism of the hunt for the serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. GB84 examines the machinations of the 1984–5 UK miners’ strike, while The Damned United explores relationships between masculinity and football through the doomed reign of manager Brian Clough at British football club Leeds United in 1974. In the Tokyo Trilogy, Peace develops an interest in occupation and the occult, interrogating Japan’s post-war legacy of defeat and its resonance to our contemporary world. This collection offers an essential guide to the work of David Peace, as well as a unique insight into his canon to date. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-08-01,Laura Mattoon D’Amore,Bound by Love: Familial Bonding in Film and Television since 1950,Hardback,978-1-4438-2985-4,39.99,"What does it mean to be bound by love? Sometimes, the bonds of love supply bliss, and sometimes they demand sacrifice. Sometimes, experiencing love saves people, and sometimes it kills them. Being bound by love often engenders moral responsibility; in other cases, it enslaves and imprisons the soul. American mythologies—especially those presented in film and television—perpetuate love as the central narrative of one’s life; the search for a connection forged by love permeates every facet of human existence, from our desire to be accepted, or our longing to be needed, to our fury at being rejected. Sometimes love is the stuff of happiness, fulfilling in every regard. But there are also times when love makes us do things we should not do; sometimes it turns us into people we do not want to become. The commonality between love that satisfies and love that destroys is the bond between people who open themselves to the vulnerability of love. Examination of the theme of familial bonds in film and television explores how the process of forming and maintaining those bonds complicates, revises, and reproduces ideas about love. The chapters in this book explore how the nature of bonds and familial responsibility inform a popular cultural dialogue about the changing nature of the American family over the past sixty years. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-09-01,Zsófia Anna Tóth,Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and its Various Adaptations,Hardback,978-1-4438-3171-0,39.99,"This book explores the different trends and the various changes in the representational history of femmes fatales within twentieth century American culture. While providing precedents, discussing the Western cultural history of this iconic female figure, as well as presenting the cultural and theoretical debates surrounding ‘her,’ the major focus lies in Maurine Dallas Watkins’s story entitled Chicago and how its diachronic and transmedial revivals contributed to this debate and what kind of an interpretation it provided of the lethal woman. Through a cultural, historical, literary and cinematic excavation this book argues that the story of Chicago produces a unique kind of deathly woman figure: the farcical femme fatale by combining the traditionally tragic aspects with comic modes of discourse and (re)presentation. In addition to the theorization of the femme fatale within Western culture, the discussion of the comic as well as various comic genres and comic strategies of representation, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival and the carnivalesque is discussed in great detail – with an emphasis on scapegoating – as well as Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Joan Riviere’s womanly masquerade in order to understand how the farcical femmes fatales of Chicago manage to get away with their sins and crimes. Additionally, the Vice of sixteenth century drama as well as the figure of the homme fatale are also taken under scrutiny since it is argued that, in the various versions of Chicago, we encounter farcical femmes fatales who are the minions of a modern(ized) Vice figure, and all their comic-grotesque performances and masquerades take place in the heterotopic space of the carnival. While also examining their historical and cultural contexts, the different versions of Chicago are investigated one by one starting from the original Chicago Tribune articles and ending in the 2002 film adaptation. This book reveals what strategies can be employed to justify the modification of the traditionally tragic scenario of the femme fatale. It is a scholarly work that is informative, thorough as well as entertaining. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-09-01,Dror Izhar,"“Quit India”: The Image of the Indian Patriot on Commercial British Film and Television, 1956-1985",Hardback,978-1-4438-3203-8,44.99,"This book looks at the changing image of the Indian Patriot’s war for India’s Independence and its reflection, which were shown during the Cold War period on the screens of commercial British films and TV. By using a variety of primary and secondary sources, as demonstrated by utilizing Gramsci’s theory of Common Sense/Folklore, the author traces the evolution of the Indian Patriot from a ‘villain’ to a ‘saint,’ and the British Colonials from ‘kind’ to ‘mediocre’ and even ‘evil’ personalities. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-10-01,Harry Eiss,Divine Madness,Hardback,978-1-4438-3298-4,54.99,"Lila is Sanskrit for play, the play of the gods. It is the self-generating genesis of Bliss, created by Bliss for the purpose of Bliss. It is the uninhibited, impulsive sport of Brahman, the free spirit of creation that results in the spontaneous unfolding of the cosmos to be found in the eternity of each moment. It is beyond the confining locks and chains of reason, beyond the steel barred windows looking out from the cages of explanation, beyond the droning tick-tick-tick of the huge mechanical clocks of time. Come, let us enter the realm of the madman and the finely wrought threads of Clotho as they are measured out by Lachesis and cut by Atropos to create the great tapestry of life, including the intricate, intertwining designs of dementia with the trickster, the shaman, the scapegoat, the shadow, the artist and the savior. Come, let us join in the divine madness of the gods. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-10-01,Kenneth R. Morefield ,Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema: Volume II,Hardback,978-1-4438-3273-1,39.99,"Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volume II continues the work presented in the first volume of this title, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008. It provides informed yet accessible articles that will give readers an introduction to masters of world cinema whose works explore the themes of human spirituality and religious faith. Volume II contains essays dealing with canonical directors notably absent from the first entry of the series (such as Godard and Kurosawa) while also including examinations of contemporary auteurs who are still actively working (for example, Andersson, and von Trier). While retaining a truly international emphasis—it includes essays about directors from the United States, Canada, Iran, Sweden, India, Denmark, Italy, Mexico, Australia, and Japan—Volume II also acts as an important contribution to canon formation, illustrating the complexity and variety in the films of those who are truly the masters of world cinema. Built solidly around close, formal readings of selective films, the essays in Volume II also demonstrate familiarity with film history and bring insight from such varied disciplines as New Testament Studies, Clinical Psychology, Art History, and Medieval History. It also seeks to broaden the understanding of ‘faith’ and ‘spirituality,’ examining how the meaning of such terms changes as the cultures that produce the art that defines them continues to evolve. ","""Volume two of Kenneth Morefiled's Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema extends and amplifies the recent religious turn in humanities study, illuminating the diversity of religious consciousness across the world and how it is reflected in contemporary film. It is an invaluable volume both for its engagement with world cinema and as a supplemental text for teaching film."" - James Rovira, Associate Professor of English, Tiffin University. Author, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-11-01,Sian Barber,Censoring the 1970s: The BBFC and the Decade that Taste Forgot,Hardback,978-1-4438-3349-3,34.99,"This book explores the work of the British Board of Film Censors in the 1970s. Throughout the decade this unelected organisation set standards of acceptability and determined what could and what could not be shown on British cinema screens. Controversial texts like A Clockwork Orange (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), The Devils (1971) and Life of Brian (1979) have been used to draw attention to the way in which the BBFC operated in the 1970s. While it is true to say that these films encountered major classification problems, what of the hundreds of other films being classified at the same time? Did all films struggle with the British censors in this period, and can these famous examples be fitted into broader patterns of censorship policy and practice? In studying over 250 film files from the BBFC archive, this work reveals how 1970s films such as Vampire Circus (1971), Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) and Carry on Emmannuelle (1978) also ran into trouble with the film censor. This work explores the complex process of negotiation and compromise which affected all film submissions in the 1970s and the way in which the BBFC actively, and often sympathetically, negotiated with film directors, producers and distributors to assign the correct category to each film. The lack of any defined formal censorship policy in this period allowed the BBFC to work alongside the film industry and push cultural, social and artistic boundaries; however it also left the Board open to accusations of favouritism, subjectivity and personal bias. This work is not simply a study of controversial films and contentious issues, but rather engages with wider issues of changing permission, legal struggles, the influence of the media and the legislative and governmental controls which both helped and hindered the BBFC in this important post-war decade. The focus on historical and archival research offers a great deal to scholars from associated disciplines including history, social policy, media and communictaions and politics. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-11-01,Tanya Nitins,Selling James Bond: Product Placement in the James Bond Films,Hardback,978-1-4438-3305-9,34.99,"The character of James Bond for many people is intrinsically linked in their minds with particular brands – Aston Martin, Bollinger, Omega, Smirnoff vodka, and so on. This direct association between character and brand highlights the intrinsic role of product placement in the film industry, and in the James Bond films in particular. Selling James Bond: Product Placement in the James Bond Films provides a comprehensive overview of the history of product placement in the James Bond series – charting the progression of the practice and drawing direct correlations to significant cultural and historical events that impacted upon the number and types of products incorporated into the series. While primarily a financial arrangement, it is also important that the practice of product placement be examined and understood in relation to these cultural contexts, an area of research so far largely ignored by academic study. Through extensive content analysis of the official James Bond film series, as well as utilising directors’ commentary and industry reports, this book illustrates the strong impact specific cultural and historical events have had on the practice of product placement in the series. In doing so, it provides an exciting and in-depth “behind the scenes” look at the James Bond film series, and its complicated and sometimes contentious history of product placement. In the process, it charts the gradual emergence of product placement from the more traditional background shot to becoming so embedded in the actual film narrative that they have become simply yet another method for filmmakers to produce cultural meaning. ","“I am very happy to have my name associated with this book – I hope there will be a halo effect. Nitins’ work is a beautifully written exemplar of how to examine entertainment. In her discussion of brands, celebrities, gadgets and spectacle she explores with precision and originality the ways in which business informs culture and culture informs business.” – Alan McKee, editor of Entertainment Industries (Routledge, 2012) and Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Blackwell, 2007) “We all know the signature line, ‘Bond, James Bond,’ and the changing machismo which Bond defines. Many words have been written exploring the lives and times of James Bond. But until this time, no serious work has examined the significance of product placement in the franchise. Nitins’ work is a new and different examination of the Bond Brand and the scramble by other brands to be associated with and to define the Bond Brand. It is a significant and unique contribution to the Bond story and a good read besides.” – Associate Professor Errol Vieth, author of Screening Science: Contexts, Texts and Science in Fifties Science Fiction Film (2001) ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-11-01,James Caterer,The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema,Hardback,978-1-4438-3307-3,39.99,"When John Major launched the UK’s National Lottery in 1994 he christened it “the people’s Lottery” and handed it to the mythical stewardship of the Everyman. But when the proceeds began to be distributed to worthy causes, including the British film industry, this populist rhetoric came under increasing strain. If Lottery funding is used to produce the type of British films which the public want to see, such as romantic comedies, then many question whether the market deserves such subsidy. Short films and low budget, experimental cinema – which often require state support – tend to go unwatched by large swathes of the Lottery ticket-buying public. This book explores the debates which were sparked by the arrival of “the people’s pictures”, and places them in historical context by examining their many precedents. Is public patronage a boon or a burden for filmmakers? And how do institutional cultures or political buzzwords affect the finished films? Case studies include the popular hits Billy Elliot (2000) and Shooting Fish (1997); art-house releases such as Love Is The Devil (1998) and Gallivant (1997); short films by Lynne Ramsey and David MacKenzie; and artists’ film and video work by Bill Viola and Tracey Emin. ","“This is an excellent and unique study of National Lottery funding for the British film industry between 1995 and 2000, set against a comprehensive historical overview of film finance in this country. Caterer’s richly detailed book skilfully combines economic and institutional analyses with discussions of cultural policy and a wide range of films and video art.” – Peter Krämer, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of East Anglia, UK ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-12-01,Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner,Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance,Hardback,978-1-4438-3440-7,39.99,"This book is a timely contribution to the emerging field of the aurality of theatre and looks in particular at the interrogation and problematisation of theatre sound(s). Both approaches are represented in the idea of ‘noise’ which we understand both as a concrete sonic entity and a metaphor or theoretical (sometimes even ideological) thrust. Theatre provides a unique habitat for noise. It is a place where friction can be thematised, explored playfully, even indulged in: friction between signal and receiver, between sound and meaning, between eye and ear, between silence and utterance, between hearing and listening. In an aesthetic world dominated by aesthetic redundancy and ‘aerodynamic’ signs, theatre noise recalls the aesthetic and political power of the grain of performance. ‘Theatre noise’ is a new term which captures a contemporary, agitatory acoustic aesthetic. It expresses the innate theatricality of sound design and performance, articulates the reach of auditory spaces, the art of vocality, the complexity of acts of audience, the political in produced noises. Indeed, one of the key contentions of this book is that noise, in most cases, is to be understood as a plural, as a composite of different noises, as layers or waves of noises. Facing a plethora of possible noises in performance and theatre we sought to collocate a wide range of notions of and approaches to ‘noise’ in this book – by no means an exhaustive list of possible readings and understandings, but a starting point from which scholarship, like sound, could travel in many directions. ","“Reading Theatre Noise is like holding a conch shell to the ear. Sounds familiar but long-ignored become magnified and theatrical. More than an inventory of noise, this book allows a sense of ‘aurality’ to reconceive theatre space and performance space. Theatre’s many noises become dramaturgical encounters. Through sounds, the contributors recognise performance spaces within our bodies, amongst the audience, between acts of utterance and acts of listening, and in the phenomenological potential of what is often considered the ‘nuisance’ of noise. The anticipated protagonists are all present (John Cage, Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Goebbels), but the contributors to this volume also introduce a contemporary collection of voices, exploring the theatre noise of the human and the machine, the actorly and the audient, the deaf and the blind, the immersive and the site-specific (Graeae, Shunt, Punchdrunk, the Wooster Group, Denis Marleau). This edited collection provides an important platform for an increasingly prominent field, and offers a resonant sounding-board for subsequent explorations of theatre noise.” – Dr Dominic Symonds, Department of Drama Creative Arts, Film and Media, University of Portsmouth “‘Are we currently discovering sound?’ asks Patrice Pavis in the Preface to this book. And reading the essays in the book is indeed to make a voyage of discovery into aspects of theatrical experience and practice hitherto unaccountably muffled from our attention. The whole book offers rich proof of the rewards of the ‘acoustic turn’ in contemporary theory.” – Prof. Nicholas Till, Professor of Opera and Music Theatre (Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre), School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex “In a field saturated with theories concerned with the dominant realm of the visual and the relentless trafficking and circulation of images, Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance offers an original and illuminating series of interventions written by theatre directors, performers, musicians, sound designers and academics from approaches that are historically, philosophically and experientially situated. The project of the book is to stake a claim for the productive ways in which performance might be entering a new era, one in which the dramaturgies of sound and noise and a “phenomenology of listening” as Patrice Pavis puts it in his preface, begin to articulate unexplored territories within the expanded disciplines of theatre and performance. An excellent and thorough introductory essay by editors, Kendrick and Roesner, focuses the reader’s consideration towards the ways in which an analysis of theatre noise can challenge our understanding of the production of the theatre event, its ontology and its effects, political and otherwise. The collection gathers together essays that together offer a rich consideration of auditory dramaturgies - from the significance of audiowalks as intersubjective “embodied acts of landscaping” (Lorimer in Myers “Vocal Landscaping, Chapter VII) where new modes of mobile and kinaesthetic experience shift the production of meaning and create a new percipient, to Katharina Rost’s close analysis of auditory captivation and the potent value of intrusive sound in Luk Percival’s Andromache, in which she argues for the value of a specific vocabulary that begins to chart the phenomenology of theatre noise; to John Collins’ (artistic director of Elevator Repair Service) astute analysis of his own history and practice as “performing” sound designer with the Wooster Group through which he retraces his discovery of the potential to construct an “aurally modulated reality” in theatre performance through the particular abilities sound has to create logic and meaning. Offering a significant intervention into the political, aesthetic and social implications of this unusually “silent” area of study, Theatre Noise will surely lead the way in encouraging further dialogue between sound studies and performance studies, and across the realms of the acoustic, the visual, the physical and the dramaturgical.” – Sara Jane Bailes, Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, Head of Drama Studies, University of Sussex “This is a significant and foundational volume. In a series of wide-ranging chapters, it successfully establishes the notion of ‘theatre noise’: suggesting new and original ways of conceiving of and theorising theatre, and opening the way for further research in the field. In identifying and proposing aurality as a full and active complement to visuality in theatre, it challenges us to reassess the role of sound in the making, reception – and potential disruption – of contemporary performance, and to rethink approaches to both the conception and analysis of its dramaturgy. It makes a considered case for the further appreciation of acoustic design as an independent phenomenon and of the role of strategies of sonic production, organisation and control in the creation of theatrical meaning. There is a sustained appreciation here of the polyphonic and contrapuntal tensions between the things seen and those heard in theatre: of the dramatic potential of the separations, collisions and interferences of meaning between the aural and visual, between aurally immersive and visually spectacular. As the editors state: ‘Sound, silence, aurality, vocality, musicality and noise agitate ideas of ocular-centric theatre.’ The case for sound itself creating the space of theatre itself is well made, setting the pervasive though differentiated atmosphere in set-aside places. But whilst the auditorium is conventionally regarded as hushed, a site of attentive listening, it too is a place of noise: of potential disturbance, interruption and response. The listener is not passive and the full consideration is given to his or her dynamic role here. The editors helpfully orientate the reader in unfamiliar territory by identifying over-arching themes – silence, embodiment, materiality, vocality, musicalisation, space, immersion, interaction, listening – but the real strength of the book is the sheer diversity of approach to something that we had barely attended. It is extremely readable and should be of interest to advanced undergraduate, post-graduate and academic audiences. Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance is a most welcome and timely contribution to the field of performance and theatre studies, supplying valuable optics with which to consider shifts in practices no longer susceptible to the conventions of textual and character analysis; and to describing the joint complexities of theatre-making and theatre-going.” – Mike Pearson, Professor of Performance Studies Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-01-01,Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,"Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2011",Hardback,978-1-4438-3458-2,44.99,"The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Fourth International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Lincoln, May 28–30, 2011. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessors in 2005, 2007 and 2009, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen thirty volumes in print, with another twelve in press or in the process of being written. The 2011 conference and the book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness. Fifty-five delegates from twenty-eight countries across the world attended the May 2011 conference in Lincoln; their range of disciplines and approaches is reflected well in this book. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-01-01,Maria Eugenia Cruset,Migration and New International Actors: An Old Phenomenon Seen With New Eyes,Hardback,978-1-4438-3457-5,34.99,"Recent studies on migration have been given a new focus and theoretical framework. The so-called “political dimension” of Diasporas, and their action at the international level as agents of para-diplomacy, as well as the introduction of analysis of the trans-national character of the migratory phenomenon, allow us to dig deeply into the field of our investigations, taking us out of the narrow frame of the Nation State. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-02-01,Peter Baofu,The Future of Post-Human Performing Arts: A Preface to a New Theory of the Body and its Presence,Hardback,978-1-4438-3520-6,54.99,"Are the performing arts really supposed to be so radical that, as John Cage once said in the context of music, “there is no noise, only sound,” since “he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music”? (WK 2007a; D. Harwood 1976) This radical tradition in performing arts, with music as an example here, can be contrasted with an opposing view in the older days, when “Greek philosophers and medieval theorists in music defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies, and vertically as harmonies. Music theory, within this realm, is studied with the presupposition that music is orderly and often pleasant to hear.” (WK 2007a) Contrary to these opposing traditions (and other views as will be discussed in the book), performing arts, in relation to both the body and its presence, is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Needless to say, the challenge to these opposing traditions in performing arts does not imply that performing arts are worthless human endeavors, or that those fields of study related to performing arts like aesthetics, acoustics, communication studies, psychology, culture studies, sociology, religion, morality, and so on should be rejected too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of performing arts, especially in the dialectic context of the body and its presence—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transdisiciplinary theory of performing arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about performing arts, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,Catriona Ryan,Border States in the Work of Tom Mac Intyre: A Paleo-Postmodern Perspective,Hardback,978-1-4438-3626-5,39.99,"This work analyses the prose and drama of the Irish writer Tom Mac Intyre and the concept of paleo-postmodernism. It examines how Mac Intyre balances traditional themes with experimentation, which in the Irish literary canon is unusual. This book argues that Mac Intyre’s position in the Irish literary canon is an idiosyncratic one in that he combines two contrary aspects of Irish literature: between what Beckett terms as the Yeatsian ‘antiquarians’ who valorize the ‘Victorian Gael’ and the ‘others’ whose aesthetic involves a European-influenced ‘breakdown of the object’ which is associated with Beckett. Mac Intyre’s experimentation involves a breakdown of the object in order to uncover an unconscious Irish mythological and linguistic space in language. His approach to language experimentation is Yeatsian and this is what the author terms as paleo-postmodern. Thus the project considers how Mac Intyre incorporates Yeatsian revivalism with postmodern deconstruction in his drama and short stories. ","“This is a critically independent piece of work that very much constructs and defines its own project, and maps an intellectual terrain of its own. It is an impressively original and also critically self-assured piece. It is marked by a sense of intellectual brio and also by the excitement of discovery.” – Dr Steven Vine, Swansea University “Since Tom Mac Intyre is a writer and dramatist who has received very little critical attention, this work intervenes in an under-researched area and offers an innovative and valuable extension of the frontier of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and dramatic studies.” – Dr Aidan Arrowsmith, Manchester Metropolitan University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-04-01,Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow,A World of Popular Entertainments: An Edited Volume of Critical Essays,Hardback,978-1-4438-3730-9,39.99,"This groundbreaking volume of critical essays about popular entertainments brings together the work of eighteen established, emerging, and independent scholars with backgrounds in Archives, Theatre and Performance, Music, and Historical Studies, currently working across five continents. The first of its kind to examine popular entertainments from a global and multi-disciplinary perspective, this collection examines a broad cross-section of historical and contemporary popular entertainment forms from Australia, England, Japan, North America, and South Africa, and considers their social, cultural and political significance. Despite the vibrant, complex, and ubiquitous nature of popular entertainments, the field has suffered from a lack of sustained academic attention. Nevertheless, popular entertainments have a global reach and a transnational significance at odds with the fact that the meaning and definition of both ‘popular’ and ‘entertainment’ remain widely contested. Since the late-nineteenth century, class-based prejudices in Western culture have championed the superiority of art and literature over the dubious and fleeting pleasures of ‘entertainment.’ Similarly, the term ‘popular’ has carried pejorative connotations, indicating something common and outside the conventional and highbrow productions of the purpose-built theatre house or concert hall. Irrespective of whether ‘popular’ is code for a cultural product with a folk origin, or a term indicating the mass appeal of a cultural product, this volume’s re-assessment of popular entertainments from a global perspective is timely. The performance research embodied in this volume was first discussed at A World of Popular Entertainments International Conference (University of Newcastle, Australia, 2009) in response to a multi-disciplinary call for scholars to explore a variety of topics relevant to the study of popular entertainments. ","“This fine collection of essays demonstrates the unconventional, enduring and changing nature of popular entertainments over a two hundred year period. In tracing these entertainments as international rather than national institutions these essays also question the orthodox notion of cultural transnationalism as a recent development. This is an important and pathbreaking book, which challenges present understandings of popular culture and its history.” – Richard Waterhouse, Emeritus Professor, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney “Since the 1960s a plethora of studies on popular entertainment have appeared, yet few approach the subject from a global or a multi-disciplinary perspective. This excellent collection will serve as a corrective to this narrow and limited scope and may well be a catalyst for broad-based examinations in the future.” – Don B. Wilmeth, Asa Messer Emeritus Professor of Theatre and English, Brown University “Spanning two centuries and more continents, this volume demonstrates quite literally in spectacular fashion both the astonishing range of popular entertainment and its global reach. The contributions bridge the gulf between ‘high’ and ‘low’ and indeed interrogate the very distinctions. This collection moves popular entertainment research forward in significant new directions.” – Christopher Balme, President, International Federation for Theatre Research (IFT/FIRT); Professor and Chair of Theatre Studies, University of Munich ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-04-01,N. H. Reeve,Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration,Hardback,978-1-4438-3656-2,34.99,"Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) is increasingly being recognised as one of the leading English novelists and short story writers of the middle of the twentieth century. Successive generations of readers have delighted in her subtle and penetrating exposures of the vanities and self-delusions of everyday life, her special sensitivity to frustration and disappointment, and the marvellous freshness of her wit and humour. Now, to mark the centenary of her birth, Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration presents several new critical assessments of her work by leading academics, together with a sizeable number of Taylor’s uncollected or unpublished writings: short stories, including the first and the last she completed, essays on writers and writing, and a selection of letters to various correspondents, including Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. Opening many previously unexplored perspectives on Taylor’s work, this volume will be essential reading for her admirers and for the wider study of the literature of her time. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-04-01,Maher Bahloul and Carolyn Graham,Lights! Camera! Action and the Brain: The Use of Film in Education,Hardback,978-1-4438-3657-9,44.99,,"“This unique and thoughtful collection of essays provides the reader with an array of creative uses of film and video in teaching and learning. Film and video are natural hooks in engaging learners. The authors of this book have provided a wonderful entry that uncovers theoretical, practical and philosophical bases for integrating film and video throughout the curriculum in multiple settings.” – Professor Merryl Ruth Goldberg, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Wheelock College, USA “This is a very important and timely book. The use of film and other screen media is ubiquitous and is accelerating. The book offers a wide range of international perspectives on this phenomenon exploring film as language, a way of researching and an increasingly popular means of creative expression and finding a voice, especially with young people. The pedagogic value of film and media literacy is clearly demonstrated and the reader will find excellent scholarship and practical, inspirational ideas for the use of film in educational settings. This book will have the power to change teaching and the way the curriculum is perceived.” – Professor Shaun Hugh, Expert in Educational Leadership and Management, University of Worcester, England ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-05-01,Magdalena Cieślak and Agnieszka Rasmus,"Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Mass Media, Popular Culture and Performance",Hardback,978-1-4438-3773-6,34.99,"Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Mass Media, Popular Culture and Performance is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars representing a number of disciplines discussing transgression and subversion in film, television, music, theatre and digital media. Moving across major political and cultural movements of the 20th century, the book addresses a global need for transgression and subversion in our times. Applying theories of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Butler, the volume is an important contribution to understanding the mechanisms and functions of subversion and transgression in contemporary media and popular culture and provides essential reading for all those seeking to go against and beyond. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-05-01,Ágnes Pethő,Film in the Post-Media Age,Hardback,978-1-4438-3753-8,49.99,"Ever since the centenary of cinema there have been intense discussions in the field of film studies about the imminent demise of the cinematic medium, endless articles championing the spirit of genuine cinephilia have proclaimed the death of classical cinema and mourned the end of an era, while new currents in media studies introduced such buzzwords into the discussions as “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin), “media convergence” (Jenkins), “post-media aesthetics” (Manovich) or “the virtual life of film” (Rodowick). By the turn of the millennium, the whole “ecosystem” of media had been radically altered through processes of hybridization and media convergence. Some theorists even claim that now that the term “medium” has triumphed in the discussions around contemporary art and culture, the actual media have already deceased, as digitized imagery absorbs all media. Moving images have entered the art galleries and new forms of inter-art relationships have been forged. They have also moved into the streets and our everyday life as a domesticated medium at everybody’s reach, into new private and public environments (and into a fusion of both via the Internet). Consequently, should we speak of an all pervasive “cinematic experience” instead of a cinematic medium? What really happens to film once its traditional medium has shape shifted into various digital forms and once its traditional locations, institutions and usages have been uprooted? What do these re-locations and re-configurations really entail? What are the most important new genres in post-media moving pictures? Is it the web video, is it 3D cinema, is it the computer game that operates with moving image narratives, is it the new “vernacular” database, the DVD, or the good old television adjusted to all these new forms? How does theatrical cinema itself adapt to or reflect on these new image forms and technologies? How can we interpret the convergence of older cinematic forms with an emerging digital aesthetics traceable in typical post-media “hosts” of moving images? These are only some of the major questions that the theoretical investigation and in-depth analyses in this volume try to answer in an attempt at exploring not the disappearance of cinema but the blooming post-media life of film. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,"Anette Pankratz, Claus-Ulrich Viol and Ariane de Waal","Birth and Death in British Culture: Liminality, Power, and Performance",Hardback,978-1-4438-3888-7,39.99,"Why discuss birth and death when they lie outside discourse, confronting us with experiences that cannot be put into words? And why look at them together when they are so much unlike each other, one the moment of fresh beginnings, joys, and the relative certainties of existence, the other the moment of life’s end, grief, and the relative uncertainties of non-existence? Because it turns out that both events, while virtually unrepresentable, have spawned a host of representations, narratives, rites, attempts at making sense of themselves and of making sense of life, the period of human existence they frame. And because they may have more similarities than appears at first sight. The 13 interdisciplinary articles collected in this volume prove that looking at the two phenomena in tandem throws into sharp relief the distinct patterns and functions of each, while also highlighting some of the fundamental historical developments, cultural functions, and socio-political issues shared by both. The contributions take stock of the discourses of birth and death prevalent in British (and Western) culture, probing into the way the two phenomena have been subjected to strategies of medialisation, commodification, and bio-politics. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli,In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy,Hardback,978-1-4438-3782-8,39.99,"Cinema may be called a bastard art in both meanings of the word: because it is usually defined as a hybrid art form, obviously, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it has been able to become formally as well as generically innovative mostly through adulterous relationships, thus making illegitimacy its grounding principle by preferring a blurred lineage to a legible succession. Trying to find what film is referred to in a sequence, therefore, amounts to establishing a clear family tree, which takes no account of the illegitimate unions, natural children and forgotten ancestors that are nevertheless part and parcel of film history. If that quest should still be conducted, its object, it seems, should not be one sole point of reference. The aim of this book is to create the opportunity of studying, and perhaps of rehabilitating, those shadowy corners of cinematographic creation and film memory, and to provide film studies, but also literature and Arts studies altogether, with a newly productive way of using such familiar notions as difference, quotation, reference, blending, hybridity, miscegenation or crossbreeding. ","“Having co-organized and co-hosted Professors Philippe Ortoli and Sébastien Lefait’s symposium on Bastardy in Cinema at Paris X University in 2011, I hereby testify that this volume, which is based on the proceedings of the conference, is a selection of high quality papers. I can highly recommend the work, which should make for an original and hopefully highly sellable book on the intriguing notion of bastardy on screen.” – Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, Professor of American Literature and Anglophone Cinema, University of Paris X-Nanterre ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,Katy Shaw,Mining the Meaning: Cultural Representations of the 1984-5 UK Miners’ Strike,Hardback,978-1-4438-3785-9,39.99,"This innovative study provides an exciting, challenging and accessible critical introduction to cultural representations of 1984–5 and analyses the ways in which these representations articulate an essential dialogic exchange of issues central to both the coal dispute and the development of literary and cultural studies over the past twenty five years. Focusing closely on the politics of form, the study interrogates the significance of the mode, means and function of strikers’ writings, as well as alternative representations of the conflict offered by established writers, musicians, artists and film-makers in the wake of the coal dispute. These representations are worthy of study due to the critical interventions they offer, their evidence of the cultural pressures and forces of not only the strike period, but the post-strike years of industrial and labour change and their remarkable contribution to existing social, political and literary histories. Engaging with these works, many of which have never been subject to previous academic analysis, the study enables twenty-first-century readers to re-conceptualise paradigms of received wisdom concerning 1984–5. The significance of the competing representations offered by these very different cultural modes as they engage in a wider battle to ‘author’ the conflict is central to this study. Through a detailed analysis of these representations, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of their production and dissemination, this book explores a range of attempts to capture the sensibilities of late twentieth century society and contributes to an ongoing debate regarding cultural representations of this period in British history. Influenced by critical theory, the text is the first secondary resource concerning cultural representations of the 1984–5 UK miners’ strike available to the reading public the world over. ","“For many years now, Dr Katy Shaw has been both the most knowledgeable and most accessible critic concerned with the literature of the 1984–85 miners’ strike, both the words and writings of the miners and their families themselves and the words and writings about them. Dr Shaw’s latest book is an astute and timely reminder of the continued relevance of the strike and its literature to Britain today.” – David Peace, author of GB84 “Katy Shaw’s important, informative and provocative study is a powerful reminder that the great miners’ strike was the definitive industrial, political and social conflict of post-war Britain. Through a skilful comparison of previously unknown ‘front line’ poems with mainstream literary, theatrical and televisual representations of the strike, Shaw exposes contemporary culture’s failure to engage with the collective solidarity at the heart of embattled mining communities, an intellectual and creative flaw that reflects the collapse of socialist values in British politics and culture.” – Prof Ian Haywood, University of Roehampton “The historical significance of the 1984–5 UK miners’ strike has long been recognised. In this scholarly yet engaged study, Katy Shaw uncovers the rich cultural life and afterlife engendered by the miners’ heroic struggle.” – Dr Mike Sanders, University of Manchester ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,Robert Shimko and Sara Freeman,Public Theatres and Theatre Publics,Hardback,978-1-4438-3784-2,39.99,"Public Theatres & Theatre Publics presents sixteen focused investigations that connect theatre and performance studies with public sphere theory. The organizing critical lens of publics and publicness allows for the chapters to speak to one another other across time periods and geographies, inviting readers to think about how performing in public shapes and circulates concepts of identity, notions of taste or belonging, markers of class, and possibilities for political agency. Each essay presents a theorized case study that grapples with fundamental questions of how individuals perform in public contexts. The essays, written by a cross-section of prominent and emerging theatre and performance scholars, contribute new discussions and understandings of how theatre and performance work, as well as how publics, publicity, and modes of publicness have been constructed and contested over the last three centuries and in multiple national contexts including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Argentina and Egypt. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-07-01,Alix Mazuet,Imaginary Spaces of Power in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Films,Hardback,978-1-4438-3896-2,34.99,"This collection of essays is unlike others in the field of African studies, for it is based on three very precisely delineated focal points: a particular geographical region, the sub-Sahara; specific modes of cultural production, literature and cinema; a concentration on works of French expression. This three-fold approach to exploring the relationships between power and culture in a non-Western environment greatly contributes to making this book unique from a variety of perspectives: African, Francophone and postcolonial studies, just as much as cross-disciplinary, cultural, transnational and diasporic studies. Moreover, the book offers deft and innovative analyses that move beyond the rhetoric of crises on the African continent we so very much and so very often hear of, so as to present a critical reflection on the subject at hand that is specific to the sub-Sahara and at the same time intimately linked to global culture, economy and politics. Our three-fold approach also presupposes that disciplinary compartmentalization increases power conflicts in academia. If only in part, compartmentalization is the result of antagonistic and competitive relations between specialization and multidisciplinary education. To this day, scholars worldwide have not been able to overcome these conflicts. This book is thus a modest attempt at presenting an alternative to excessively fixed and homogeneous academic frontiers while considering that disciplinary expertise remains a must. Keeping in mind that an increasing number of scholars in Anglophone Postcolonial studies and Francophone African studies have been attempting for quite some time now to open interstices and build crossroads that can better connect them to each others, keeping in mind that these scholars work at revealing mechanisms by which any antagonistic discourses can mix, influence, act upon or react to one another, this book seeks to take a constructive step in establishing enduring grounds for multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and transnational academic research and collaboration. Finally, if we consider that African studies’ disciplinary boundaries are far from immutable and firmly drawn, this book addresses a glaring lack in popular and scholarly research and analyses of Africa. Indeed, Imaginary Spaces of Power in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Films has the great advantage of addressing in a single publication matters that are geographically and linguistically specific yet matters that have become sources of great concern for a large number of people throughout the world. In this sense, the book will appeal just as much to literary and film critics, anthropologists and ethnographers, political sciences and cultural studies specialists, postcolonial, neocolonial and transnational theorists, as it will to anyone who wants to stay informed about current debates on relationships between power and culture. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-07-01,Kate Darian-Smith and Sue Turnbull,"Remembering Television: Histories, Technologies, Memories",Hardback,978-1-4438-3970-9,39.99,"This path-breaking book extends our knowledge of the social and cultural impacts of television, asking new questions about the ways television’s technologies and programming have been experienced, understood and remembered. Television has served as a companion to the historical events that have unfolded in our everyday lives both on and off the screen, and its presence is intricately bound up in our memories of the past and actions in the present. As this volume demonstrates, the influence of television over individual and family behaviours, national identity and ideas of global citizenship is complex and wide-ranging. Drawing upon recent developments in memory studies, history, media and cultural studies, and with particular reference to Australia, leading scholars explore the histories of television, and how its programs and personalities have been celebrated, recalled with nostalgia or simply forgotten. Topics covered include the pre-figuring of television; memories of the struggle for transmission in remote locations; the transnational experience of television for immigrant communities; the evocation of television programs through spin-off products; televised war reportage and censorship; and the value of ‘unofficial’ television archives such as You Tube. As a whole, these essays offer a striking and original examination of the connections between history, memory and television in today’s world. ","“Our memories of television are crucial components of our sense of personal history, and one of the ways we experience our national histories. In this rich and exciting collection, some of our leading scholars examine the relationships between television, histories, and memory.” —Professor Graeme Turner, Director, Centre for Critical Cultural Research, University of Queensland “This book is an important contribution to our understanding of television history. It is about much more than the history of television as an institution or a set of programmes, or the representation of history on television, or even people’s memories of the role of television in their lives. It is about the interweaving of all these, and more. And that is precisely its great value, because it makes us rethink what counts as a ‘history of television’. Its case studies may be Australian, but this book has much to say to television scholars everywhere – and indeed scholars of cultural memory more widely.” —Professor Martin Barker, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia “Remembering Television is an exciting foray into media history, popular culture and memory studies. In lively and accessible essays, leading scholars consider places, pleasures, wars, technologies, the digital, the national and the global. While the focus is on Australia and New Zealand, the work presented here deserves to be read internationally by academics, students, librarians, archivists and industry. Just as television compels audiences, so too does this unique book.” —Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, Director, Centre for Media History, Macquarie University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing