Women's Film and Female Experience takes a fresh look at a wide range of popular women's films in order to discover what American female consciousness in the 1940s was really about. The author traces the evolution and development of the Hollywood women's film, and describes the social history of American women in the 1940s. She then analyzes dominant narrative patterns within popular women's films of the decade: the maternal drama, the career woman comedy, and the films of suspicion and distrust.

The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection revises, reframes, and deconstructs persistent critical binaries that have been put in place by scholarly discourse to label 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a “classical” period or “canonical” mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios. The book's four sections re-evaluate the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors informing 1940s horror cinema to introduce new theoretical frameworks and to open up space for scholarly discussion of 1940s horror genre hybridity, periodization, and aesthetics. Chapters focused on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in forties horror cinema, 1940s proto-slasher films, the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios, and critical reevaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) and “slippery” auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield, work to recover a decade of horror that has been framed as having fallen victim to repetition, exhaustion, and decline.

Transgressing Women focuses on the literary and cinematic representation of female characters in contemporary noir thrillers. The book argues that as the genre has grown, expanded and been subverted since its initial conception, along with the changing definition of gender, the representation of a female character has also inevitably gone through some dramatic changes. So, the book asks some important questions: What links the female characters in canonical noir to their contemporary counterparts? Is gender division still relevant in a text that transgresses gender boundaries? What happens when it is the human body itself that betrays the traditional definition or constitution of a human being? While many have written about the male protagonists and the femmes fatales in the noir genre, little attention has been given to the ‘other’ female characters who inhabit the noir world and are transgressors themselves. The main concern of the book is to trace the transgressive female characters in contemporary noir thrillers – both novels and films – by engaging itself with some of the most topical debates within both (post)feminist and postmodernist theories. The book is structured around two key concepts – space and the body. These temporal and spatial indicators are central in contemporary cultural theories such as postmodernism and post-feminism, along with other theorizations of gender and the noir genre. This means that the analysis is drawn from the classical noir examples and will then arrive at the neo-noir sub-genre, and then will move on to the most recent phenomenon in the genre, ‘future noir’.

Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to the arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.

Hollywood’s Gene Tierney, the lasting impact of her wartime and postwar films, and her continuing legacy. Gene Tierney may be one of the most recognizable faces of studio-era Hollywood: she starred in numerous classics, including Leave Her to Heaven, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,and Laura,with the latter featuring her most iconic role. While Tierney was considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she personified "ordinariness" both on- and off-screen. Tierney portrayed roles such as a pinup type, a wartime worker, a wife, a mother, and, finally, a psychiatric patient—the last of which may have hit close to home for her, as she would soon leave Hollywood to pursue treatment for mental illness and later attempted suicide in the 1950s. After her release from psychiatric clinics, Tierney sought a comeback as one of the first stars whose treatment for mental illness became public knowledge. In this book, Will Scheibel not only examines her promotion, publicity, and reception as a star but also offers an alternative history of the United States wartime efforts demonstrated through the arc of Tierney's career as a star working on the home front. Scheibel's analysis aims to showcase that Tierney was more than just "the most beautiful woman in movie history," as stated by the head of production at Twentieth Century Fox in the 1940s and 1950s. He does this through an examination of her making, unmaking, and remaking at Twentieth Century Fox, rediscovering what she means as a movie legend both in past and up to the present. Film studies scholars, film students, and those interested in Hollywood history and the legacy of Gene Tierney will be delighted by this read.

-- Elaine May, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

A lively collection of essays on the cultures of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. Topics range from prostitution and slavery to the effect of war on fashion magazine reporting to inter-racial marriage in the postwar years. Particular areas of focus include the Second World War, its legacies and the reactions to postwar decolonization.

Essays analyze the two world wars in respect to gender politics and reassesses the differences between men and women in relation to war

A comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century “An intelligently provocative, vital reading experience. . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture.”—Kirkus Reviews “A comprehensive and lucid overview of the ongoing campaign to free women from ‘the tyranny of old notions.’”—Publishers Weekly What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement. This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations. Noting that every attempt to cement a particular definition of “woman” has been met with resistance, Faderman also shows that successful challenges to the status quo are often short-lived. As she underlines, the idea of womanhood in America continues to be contested.