This volume overturns traditional definitions of narrative by arguing that any story, whether a Bette Davis film, a jeans ad, a Jane Austen novel of a Cathy comic, must be related to larger cultural networks. The authors show how meanings and subjectivity do not exist in isolation, but are manufactured by the narratives our culture reads and watches every day. They call for a critical practice that, through the fracturing of texts, can alter the grounds of knowledge and interpretation. This study should interest critics of narrative and culture, as well as students wanting to extend...

Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory.
Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those...

The Road Movie Book is the first comprehensive study of an enduring but ever-changing Hollywood genre, its place in American culture, and its legacy to world cinema. The road and the cinema both flourished in the twentieth century, as technological advances brought motion pictures to a mass audience and the mass produced automobile opened up the road to the ordinary American. When Jean Baudrillard equated modern American culture with 'space, speed, cinema, technology' he could just as easily have added that the road movie is its supreme emblem.
The contributors explore how the...

The Road Movie Book is the first comprehensive study of an enduring but ever-changing Hollywood genre, its place in American culture, and its legacy to world cinema. The road and the cinema both flourished in the twentieth century, as technological advances brought motion pictures to a mass audience and the mass produced automobile opened up the road to the ordinary American. When Jean Baudrillard equated modern American culture with 'space, speed, cinema, technology' he could just as easily have added that the road movie is its supreme emblem.
The contributors explore how the...

The articles in this collection examine the musical in relation to its generic form and conventions, the relationship between narrative and spectacle, gender and feminist analysis, camp production and reception, stardom, and the representation of race and ethnicity. The book includes essays by Rick Altman, Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca, Carol Clover, Steven Cohan, Richard Dyer, Jane Feuer, Patricia Mellencamp, Linda Mizejewski, Shari Roberts, Pamela Robertson, Michael Rogin, Martin Rubin and Matthew Tinkcom.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

With their lavish costumes and sets, ebullient song and dance numbers, and iconic movie stars, the musicals that mgm produced in the 1940s seem today to epitomize camp. Yet they were originally made to appeal to broad, mainstream audiences. In this lively, nuanced, and provocative reassessment of the mgm musical, Steven Cohan argues that this seeming incongruity between the camp value and popular appreciation of these musicals is not as contradictory as it seems. He demonstrates that the films extravagance and queerness were deliberate elements and keys to their popular success.

In...

With their lavish costumes and sets, ebullient song and dance numbers, and iconic movie stars, the musicals that mgm produced in the 1940s seem today to epitomize camp. Yet they were originally made to appeal to broad, mainstream audiences. In this lively, nuanced, and provocative reassessment of the mgm musical, Steven Cohan argues that this seeming incongruity between the camp value and popular appreciation of these musicals is not as contradictory as it seems. He demonstrates that the films extravagance and queerness were deliberate elements and keys to their popular success.

In...

The backstudio picture, or the movie about movie-making, harks back to the silent era and extends to the present day. Covering the hundred-year timespan of feature length film production, this original study of a longstanding yet unrecognized genre offers an illuminating perspective for considering anew the history of American movies.

The backstudio picture, or the movie about movie-making, harks back to the silent era and extends to the present day. Covering the hundred-year timespan of feature length film production, this original study of a longstanding yet unrecognized genre offers an illuminating perspective for considering anew the history of American movies.