The Lola film is a distinct subgenre of the woman's film in which woman's claim to pleasure is entertained without recourse to the figure of the femme fatale. This book examines Lola as a specific and enduring aspect of the "new woman" woman's forthright claim to pleasure on her own terms, liberated from the usual constraints of sex and gender.

Invoking Goethe's name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that -Goethe's ghosts- - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown, whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the...