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The Cultural Studies Reader
The Cultural Studies Readeris essential reading for any student wanting to know how cultural studies developed, where it is now, and its future directions.
Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City
Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City instantly, markedly, and permanently changed the landscape of film history. Made at the end of World War II, it has been credited with initiating a revolution in and reinvention of modern cinema, bold claims that are substantiated when its impact on how films are conceptualized, made, structured, theorized, circulated, and viewed is examined. This 2004 volume offers a fresh look at the production history of Rome Open City; some of its key images, and particularly its representation of the city and various types of women; its cinematic influences and affinities; the complexity of its political dimensions, including the film's vision of political struggle and the political uses to which the film was put; and the legacy of the film in public consciousness. It serves as a well illustrated, up to date, and accessible introduction to one of the major achievements of filmmaking.
Neorealist Film Culture, 1945-1954
Unique, truthful, brutal... Neorealism is often associated with adjectives stressing its peculiarities in representing the real, its lack of antecedents, and its legacy in terms of film style. While this is useful when confronting auteurs such as De Sica, Rossellini or Visconti, it becomes problematic when examining a widespread cultural practice that realistic modes deeply affected. This cultural production included filmmaking, literature, visual culture and photography, as well as media discourses. It was internally contradictory but fruitful inasmuch as its legacy influenced national culture for many decades to come. The volume spotlights post-war Italian film culture by locating a series of crossroads, i.e. topics barely examined when discussing neorealism: nation, memory and trauma, visual culture, stardom, and performance. The aim is to deconstruct neorealism as a monument and to open up its cultural history.
Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama
Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and ...
European National Identities
Making sense of the perplexing diversity of Europe is a challenging task. How compatible are national identities in Europe? What makes Europe European? What do Europeans have in common? European National Identities explores the diversity of European states, nations, and peoples. In doing so, the editors focus on the origins and elements of different national identities in Europe and different themes of national self-understanding. Each chapter contributes a unique view of national identities gravitating around myth, historical experiences and traumas, values, ethnic and linguistic differences, and religious fault lines. This work grounds European national identities within cultural, historical, and political dynamics, which makes the work approachable for many readers, including historians, sociologists, and political scientists. In addition, the editors illustrate that national identities continue to be a source of contention and a challenge to political developments, the demands of immigrants and minorities, and the dynamics of European integration. This book draws particular attention to identity shifts and conflicts within individual European countries.
Catlin's Lament
The first book to probe the conflicted attitudes that shaped and constrained noted painter George Catlin, famous for his 19th century paintings of vanishing Native American culture. Forces readers to rethink their understanding of the artist--despite his advocacy for Native peoples.
Modern Literary Theory, a Comparative Introduction
The aim of this book is to provide within the compass of a single volume an introduction to the major developments in this field that have taken place during the twentieth century in Europe and North America. The authors explain the assumptions of these theories concerning the nature of literature and criticism, showing how they relate to one another, and linking them to the general issues raised by all critical practice. In succeeding chapters, the book considers individual theorists and schools, focusing in turn on Russian Formalism, modern linguistics, post-structuralism, modern psychoanalytic criticism and Marxist theories. For readers who wish to pursue further their study of particular theories, selected bibliographies are provided at the end of each chapter. -- From publisher's description.
How Political Singers Facilitated the Spanish Transition to Democracy, 1960-1982
This study offers an examination of the work of popular Spanish singer-songwriters, Victor Manuel, Joaquin Sabina and Ana Belen, and the connection between their works and the broader context of the Spanish democratic transition (1960-1982). This work should appeal to scholars interested in political science, history, cultural studies and Hispanic studies. singer-songwriters Victor Manuel and Joaquin Sabina and in those by well-known female political singer Ana Belen between the years 1968 and 1982. It examines the connections that existed between their works and the broader Spanish context of the Transition (1960-1982) to democracy. It also explores the representations of Spanish national i...
Stardom, Italian Style
The definitive book on stardom in Italian cinema
Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta)
Otto Preminger said the history of the cinema was divided into two eras: one before and one after Rome Open City (Roma Città Aperta, 1945). The film is based on events that took place in Rome in 1944, during the Nazi occupation. This book re-examines the film and its place in Rossellini's career. David Forgacs reconstructs its production history, its relationship to the events that inspired it and the time in which it was made. He argues that the traditional critical labelling of Rome Open City as the original work of neo-realism fails to capture the film's hybrid and contradictory character. Part documentary record, part patriotic myth, Rome Open City is at once an extraordinarily powerful commemoration of wartime experience and a rhetorical reworking of that experience, using stereotypes and moral polarisations.
