Sexual visuality from literature to film, 1850-19502004

"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, Virginia 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. The book is a must-read for scholars and students of visuality, gender and sexuality."--BOOK JACKET.