Danielle Hipkins Bücher

The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. Chapters in the book address aspects of industry and spectatorship and the varied film psychology of infancy, childhood and adolescence, as well as genres as diverse as silent cinema, contemporary teen movies, melodrama and film ethnography. The contributors engage with a wide range of modes and theories including neorealism, auteurism and contemporary postfeminism. The book maps out new roles for gender, the transnational, loss and mourning, and filmmaking itself, leading to a revised understanding of the child in Italian cinema.

In the period 1940 to 1965 the female prostitute featured in at least ten per cent of all Italian-made films, but she cast her shadow over many more. With reference to the changing social and film industrial context, this book explains why the figure of the female prostitute was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence. It shows that the prostitutes that populate Italian cinema are much more than simply 'tarts with hearts' or martyr figures. Via the constant reworking of the prostitute trope across genres, the figure takes us to the heart of many ideological contradictions in postwar Italian cinema and society: these include the entanglement of rhetoric about political truth with the suppression of postwar guilt and shame, fears about racial contamination, and a preoccupation with non-normative forms of masculine behaviour and desire. The book also shows how the female prostitute is important to Italian national cinema as a 'borderline identity', used to establish, but also destabilize, the hegemony of respectable femininities. It is precisely through her borderline condition, this book argues, that the prostitute 'haunts' gender, sometimes policing it, but more often than not problematizing its very construction.

This book has been inspired by the emphasis that Mark Davie's studies have put on the cooperative nature of artistic and intellectual pursuits in the humanities. Whilst the importance of connections between intellectuals is often acknowledged in the form of intertextual studies, research into real dialogue between individuals is little researched, partly due to the practical challenges of such research. The ten chapters of this book - written by specialists in different cultures - redress in part this imbalance and offer a new angle on the canon by tracing the impact of concrete partnerships and communities in Italian and European history. The issues that the volume's contributors keep in mind include: the reasons that artists and intellectuals choose to collaborate; the forms that this collaboration takes; the factors that determine its success; and whether some areas of culture lend themselves to intellectual collaboration better than others.

This book is the outcome of a successful workshop held in Leeds in September 2003 and explores the effects of World War II on the representation of gender in post-war literature, film and popular culture, juxtaposing Western European experience with US, Soviet and Japanese. It aims to outline the different ways in which these representations evolved in post-war attempts both to re-establish social order and reconstruct national identity. It gives the reader an overview of the similarities and differences that have emerged in the representation of war and gender in different cultures and media, as a result of social expectations, political change and individual artistic innovation. The essays are linked by their concern with three key how are emotion and gender represented in relation to the experience of war; what is the impact of war on the dynamic between the genders; and, as the memory of war recedes, is it possible to identify chronological shifts in the artistic response to the conflict?