Oscar Wilde

Eric Schaefer

Driven by the experience of pleasure, Dorian Gray offers his soul for the chance to be forever young and beautiful. What he loses in the exchange is more than any pleasure on earth can replace. Elegantly perverse, Oscar Wilde's powerful Gothic tale was originally censored in England. Book reviewers called it mawkish and unclean. Wilde's response to his critics are found in the book's Preface: "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Steven Jay Schneider

Exploring the depiction of violence and related issues in Hollywood productions, this book focuses on the motivations and cultural politics of violence on the big screen, as well as its effects on viewers and society as a whole.

New Hollywood Violence

A social and cultural history of exploitation films, which were produced on the fringes of Hollywood and often dealt with subjects forbidden by the Production Code.

A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959

"Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!"

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world. Contributors. Joseph Lam Duong, Jeffrey Escoffier, Kevin M. Flanagan, Elena Gorfinkel, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Eithne Johnson, Arthur Knight, Elana Levine, Christie Milliken, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Jacob Smith, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Linda Williams

Eric Schaefer

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