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.

Autorentext
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.

Inhalt
Introduction: Unsightly Desires Lady in Green with Novel: Demonizing Artists and Female Authors Framed and Hung: The Economic Beauty of Wilkie Collins's Manly Artist Posing a Threat: Wilde, the Marquess and the Portrayal of Degeneracy The Forest Beyond the Frame: Women's Desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf Where the Boys Are: Daphne du Maurier and the Masculine Art of Unremarkability The Face in the Crowd: Film Noir 's Common Excess Epilogue Works Cited Index