Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral...

Wittgenstein, Culture and the Arts is the first full exploration of the profound implications of Wittgenstein's philosophy for understanding the arts and cultural criticism. This stellar collection of original essays by philosophers and critics of the arts addresses the main philosophical topics of importance in the study of the arts and culture, such as humanism, criticism, the philosophy of language, psychology, painting, performance, film and ethics. The essays exemplify Wittgenstein's method of conceptual investigation and highlight his notion of philosophy as a cure. This will be an...