Sexual Visuality From Literature To Film 1850-1950

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction: Unsightly Desires

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 1-17

3. Lady in Green with Novel: Demonizing Artists and Female Authors

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 18-50

4. Framed and Hung: The Economic Beauty of Wilkie Collins’s Manly Artist

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 51-74

5. Posing a Threat: Wilde, the Marquess, and the Portrayal of Degeneracy

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 75-97

6. The Forest Beyond the Frame: Women’s Desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 98-120

7. Where the Boys Are: Daphne du Maurier and the Masculine Art of Unremarkability

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 121-153

8. The Face in the Crowd: Film Noir’s Common Excess

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 154-181

9. Epilogue

   • Dennis Denisoff

   Pages 182-186

10. Back Matter

    Pages 187-223

    PDF

A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality. Denisoff's study explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and noir literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the visual in order to challenge sex- and gender-based assumptions that marginalized certain people and desires. Addressing authors and directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virigina 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.

• Alfred Hitchcock
• cinema
• English literature
• film
• Fritz Lang
• gender
• Oscar Wilde
• society
• Virginia Woolf
• Woolf

DENNIS DENISOFF is the author of Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840-1940, editor of Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose, and co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. He is a member of the Graduate School in Communications and Culture jointly run by Ryerson University and York University, Toronto.

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