Bluebeard's Legacy: Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock (New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845116321 ISBN 13: 9781845116323

Publisher: I.B.Tauris, 2009

Synopsis

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife, a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers, artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal.

This transdisciplinary book explores the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebeard’s tale to explore masculinity’s anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality: anxieties also of ethnic and cultural difference, and fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine.

Starting with investigations into Bartók’s opera 'Duke Bluebeard’s Castle', major cultural thinkers, including Elisabeth Bronfen, Ian Christie, Griselda Pollock and Maria Tatar, trace Bluebeard’s evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the cinematic hommes fatals of Méličs, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock.

The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.

About this title

About the Author

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Her numerous books include Vision and Difference, Differencing the Canon, Theatre of Memory and Conceptual Odysseys (IBT, 2008). She is the Series Editor of Tauris' ""New Encounters"" Series.

Victoria Anderson is Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Outfoxed: the Secret Life of a Fairy Tale.

Edition details

• Publisher: I.B.Tauris
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1845116321
• ISBN 13: 9781845116323
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Anderson Victoria, Pollock Griselda