Re-reading Freud's writing on femininity, fantasy and social identification, Lost Angels expands the psychoanalytic framework within which contemporary debates regarding fantasy and spectatorship have been taking place.Vicky Lebeau takes Freud's preoccupation with femininity and feminine fantasy as her starting point and goes on to explore his differentiation between masculine and feminine forms of fantasy through feminist and critical theories of spectatorship and cinema....

Since its inception the world of cinema has embraced the image of the child and both extended and challenged its representations. Vicky Lebeau explores the complex and ongoing adventure of childhood on screen and examines how the child in film has been used to embody the aspirations and anxieties of modern life. Moving from early to contemporary cinema – a process that includes discussions of films such as Victorian ‘Child Pictures’, The Spirit of the Beehive, L'Enfant sauvage, 400 Blo...

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-si...

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-si...

This volume contains a collection of outstanding examples of psychoanalytic film criticism, applying different theoretical orientations, drawn from the first four years of the film review section in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis during author's tenure as film review editor.

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing new light on these and other questions he has raised in previous best-sellers, Eagleton offers a new theory of what we mean by literature. He also shows what it is that a great ...

An illuminating study of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel with special attention to its film versions. From its first publication in 1955 Nabokov's Lolita has been denounced as immoral filth, hailed as a moral masterpiece, and both praised and damned for stylistic excess. In this fresh appraisal John Lennard provides convenient overviews of Nabokov's life and of the novel (including both Kubrick's and Lyne's film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery,...

Metafiction begins by surveying the state of contemporary fiction in Britain and America and explores the complex political, social and economic factors which influence critical judgment of fiction. The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. Making use of contemporary fiction by such writers as Fowles, Borges, Spark, Barthelme, Braut...

Almost everything you need to know in one essential guideSeeing a film is only half the fun. The real joy comes from arguing about it afterwards in the pub or on the journey home. But have you ever felt you needed to know a little more?This book offers a concise introduction to the appreciation and study of film. This second edition begins with an examination of early film theory before analysing how films are put together - framing, performance, setting, costume and editin...

It sounds daunting: all those '-isms', long technical words, weird French thinkers and incomprehensible Germans. You can't read a book nowadays, it seems, without being required to refer to them. From university students to the average intelligent reader, everyone is expected to justify their 'theoretical perspective'. The problem is that defining what you mean by 'theory', let alone what you mean by 'literary', causes most people, including the theorists themselves, to mumble incoherently...

Ramona Koval has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative, and often funny.In this new collection, Speaking Volumes: conversations with remarkable writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand-new ones with some of the most important writers of our times.Through Koval, we are privy to the extraordinary minds of...

This text outlines what sociologists need to know of the nature of communication and of mass culture, while also looking in some empirical detail at the workings of the Hollywood community and the psychology of the star system. It explores trends such as attempts to adapt semiology and psycholinguistics to our understanding of film ‘language’, using them to develop a paradigm for film analysis. The book goes on to offer a guide to comprehension of the relation between cinema and society th...