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Palgrave Macmillan

Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

  • Book
  • © 2013

Overview

Authors:
  1. Alan Bilton

    1. Swansea University, Swansea, UK

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
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  2. A Brief Chronology of Silent Film Comedy

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 1-12

  3. Introducing American Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 13-32

  4. A Convention of Crazy Bugs: Mack Sennett and the US’s Immigrant Unconscious

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 33-77

  5. Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 78-110

  6. Nobody Loves a Fat Man: Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and Conspicuous Consumption in the US of the 1920s

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 111-136

  7. Dizzy Doras and Big-Eyed Beauties: Mabel Normand and the Notion of the Female Clown

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 137-154

  8. Consumerism and Its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 155-174

  9. Buster Keaton and the American South: The First Things and the Last

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 175-194

  10. The Shell-Shocked Silents: Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and the First World War

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 195-216

  11. Conclusion

    • Alan Bilton
    Pages 217-222

  12. Back Matter

    Pages 223-244
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Keywords

About this book

This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags expressing the unconscious wishes and fears of the modern age, in a way that foreshadows the concerns of our own celebrity-obsessed consumer culture.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Alan Bilton

About the author

Alan Bilton is Lecturer in English and American Studies at Swansea University, UK. He is author of An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (EUP, 2002), editor of America in the 1920s: Literacy Sources and Documents, Volume One: The Cultural Condition, Volume Two: Voices of Modernity and Volume Three: An Age of Performance (with Philip Melling, Helm Information, 2004), and he has published articles in international journals such as the European Journal of American Studies, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and The Journal of American Studies.

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