| Synopsis: |
With the body, what you see is not exactly what you get. For centuries, vision has often been held as the purest, most direct encounter between the individual and the outside world. Recent visuality theory, however, has demonstrated that the process of seeing is always influenced by other senses, cultural elements, memory and history. Meanwhile, scholarship on gender and sexuality has developed a conception of the body itself as a 'text' written by more than one person and read in more than one way. Sexual Visuality From Literature to Film, 1850-1950 explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and noir literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the visual in order to foreground our unsightly desires. By doing so, the texts challenged sex- and gender-based assumptions that marginalized certain types of people. Addressing authors and directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virgnia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, this study shows that what a society gets is often what it tries hardest not to see. A must-read for scholars and students of visuality, gender and sexuality. |