Alistair Fox

Anne Gillain

The Lost Secret

François Truffaut

This book presents a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a central male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. Case studies by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino demonstrate how the art-house male melodrama offers a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, rather than the heroic stereotypes commonly found in popular genre cinema.

Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema

Through the analyses of select films of New Zealand, this title examines the role of the national cinema in nation-building, and explores how the signifying strategies of cinema have been harnessed to attribute meaning to this country's evolving history.

Interpreting the Past

New Zealand Cinema

Thomas More's Utopia remains indisputably the most potent work in the genre of writing that it initiated and in fact named. Since it was published in 1516 - in a Tudor-ruled England responding to the wave of humanist thought sweeping across Europe - this fantasy voyage has inspired centuries of social reformers, who have embraced More's fiction as a realistic blueprint for a new, ideal society. On the literary side, writers from Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have plied the genre More invented, and yet none has arrived at a conclusion more prophetic than the original: that the dogged quest for an imagined ideal generates doubt that this ideal would be as attractive in practice as in theory, and that, given what we know of human nature, such an ideal could ever be implemented. In Utopia: An Elusive Vision Alistair Fox places More's masterwork in the context of the reform aspirations of early-sixteenth-century European humanists, tracing the stages of its composition to show how and why the book came to be inherently paradoxical and showing us why the book in many ways presaged the rise of Martin Luther and the watershed Protestant Reformation. Fox lucidly explores the complex, equivocal nature of More's vision, which, he contends, was conditioned not only by More's recognition that people's desire for ideal social order conflicts with many of their most basic impulses but also by his propensity for seeing most issues simultaneously from contradictory perspectives. This paradox and tension led More to create a fiction that, according to Fox, allows human imperfection to interrogate the validity of the "ideal" society the fiction presents, without confirming or subverting it. With UtopiaMore encourages readers to explore what he reveals to be a perpetual dilemma in utopianism itself. Fox concludes that, by thus encompassing and provoking the full range of reactions that subsequent utopias and "dystopias" would likely elicit, More's Utopia is both the prototype and epitome of the utopian genre itself. Fox's engaging study is the most extensive treatment of Utopia to date, examining the work as one which evolved in response to More's changing emotional perceptions and treating More's text as a vehicle for intellectual exploration rather than a definitive proclamation. Utopia: An Elusive Vision, replete with historical detail and an overview of criticism of More's text through four centuries, allows readers to discern for themselves the features that contribute to Utopia's intellectual and rhetorical complexity.

An Elusive Vision

Utopia

This book reassesses Renaissance English literature and its place in Elizabethan society. It examines, in particular, the role of Italianate literary imitation in addressing the ethical and political issues of the sixteenth century.

Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England

The English Renaissance

Explores the complex ethical dilemmas of human mobility in the context of climate change

Genre, Gender and Adaptation in a National Cinema

Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand

Hilary Radner

Barry Keith

New Zealand has produced one of the world’s most vibrant film cultures, a reflection of the country’s evolving history and the energy and resourcefulness of its people. From early silent features like The Te Kooti Trail to recent films such as River Queen in the new millennium, this book examines the role of the cinema of New Zealand in building a shared sense of national identity. The works of key directors, including Peter Jackson, Jane Campion, and Vincent Ward, are here introduced in a new light, and select films are given in-depth coverage. Among the most informative accounts of New Zealand’s fascinating national cinema, this will be a must for film scholars around the globe.

Michel Marie

Raphaëlle Moine

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspects of French cinema from 1990 to the present day. Features original contributions from top film scholars relating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema Includes new research on matters relating to the political economy of contemporary French cinema, developments in cinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digital filmmaking Contains an unusually large range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those of genre, gender, auteur, industry, economic, star, postcolonial and psychoanalytic studies Includes essays by important French cinema scholars from France, the U.S., and New Zealand, many of whose work is here presented in English for the first time

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema

This is the first critical study to investigate, at length, how masculine subjectivities are represented in contemporary New Zealand fiction. Notoriously self-contained and private, Kiwi men are often reluctant to talk about their personal feelings and embarrassed at the thought that any private emotional difficulties could be exposed to critical examination. One must go to their imaginative literature to make contact with the reality that underlies the often calculatedly deceptive surface. In his investigation of these issues, author Alistair Fox demonstrates the crucial importance of Pakeha and Maori cultural predispositions influencing masculine identity in New Zealand, often at the cost of great psychic pain for the men involved.

Alistair Fox

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