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Addressing areas such as genre, film history and style, action and spectacle, stars and bodies, action auteurs and the film industry, the reader covers both Hollywood and also European and Asian action cinema.
“Like swordplay itself, By the Sword is elegant, accurate, romantic, and full of brio—the definitive study, hugely readable, of man’s most deadly art.”—Simon Winchester With a new Preface by the author Napoleon fenced. So did Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Grace Kelly, and President Truman, who as a schoolboy would practice fencing with Bess—his future wife— when the two of them returned home from school. Lincoln was a canny dueler. Ignatius Loyola challenged a man to a duel for denying Christ’s divinity (and won). Less successful, but no less enthusiastic, was Mussolini, who would tell his wife he was “off to get spaghetti,” their code to avoid alarming the children. By the Sword is an epic history of sword fighting—a science, an art, and, for many, a religion that began at the dawn of civilization in ancient Egypt and has been an obsession for mankind ever since. With wit and insight, Richard Cohen gives us an engrossing history of the world via the sword. Praise for By the Sword “Touché! While scrupulous and informed about its subject, Richard Cohen’s book is about more than swordplay. It reads at times like an alternative social history of the West.”—Sebastian Faulks “In writing By the Sword, [Cohen] has shown that he is as skilled with the pen as he is with the sword.”—The New York Times “Irresistible . . . extraordinary . . . vivid and hugely enjoyable.”—The Economist “A virtual encyclopedia on the subject of sword fighting.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Literate, learned, and, beg pardon, razor-sharp . . . a pleasure for practitioners, and a rewarding entertainment for the armchair swashbuckler.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Those tales of old--King Arthur, Robin Hood, The Crusades, Marco Polo, Joan of Arc--have been told and retold, and the tradition of their telling has been gloriously upheld by filmmaking from its very inception. From the earliest of Georges Melies's films in 1897, to a 1996 animated Hunchback of Notre Dame, film has offered not just fantasy but exploration of these roles so vital to the modern psyche. St. Joan has undergone the transition from peasant girl to self-assured saint, and Camelot has transcended the soundstage to evoke the Kennedys in the White House. Here is the first comprehensive survey of more than 900 cinematic depictions of the European Middle Ages--date of production, country of origin, director, production company, cast, and a synopsis and commentary. A bibliography, index, and over 100 stills complete this remarkable work.
The medieval film genre is not, in general, concerned with constructing a historically accurate past, but much analysis nonetheless centers on highlighting anachronisms. This book aims to help scholars and aficionados of medieval film think about how the re-creation of an often mythical past performs important cultural work for modern directors and viewers. The essays in this collection demonstrate that directors intentionally insert modern preoccupations into a setting that would normally be considered incompatible with these concepts. The Middle Ages provide an imaginary space far enough removed from the present day to explore modern preoccupations with human identity.
Swords and Swordsmen chronicles the major developments in the sword's design, manufacture and use from Ancient Egypt to the American Civil War. Author Mike Loades traces the history of the sword in war and the evolution of the private duel. The book takes certain surviving swords as landmarks on this journey of discovery. Each can be linked to a specific individual, allowing each sword to be discussed in the social and military context of its time and forming the starting point for detours through other types of sword and contemporary developments in their design, manufacture and use. From Tutankhamun to General Custer, and including a chapter on the legendary samurai Uesugi Kenshin, this book charts the lives of warriors from many ages and cultures; men whose lives often depended on their skill with the sword. Illustrated with line drawings (many derived from old fight manuals) and dozens of photographs of surviving swords, Swords and Swordsmen celebrates these weapons as iconic works of art and powerful cultural symbols as well as examining the lethal practicality of their sue.
Treasure Neverland is about factual and fictional pirates. Swashbuckling eighteenth-century pirates were the ideal pirates of all time and tales of their exploits are still popular today. Most people have heard of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd even though they lived about three hundred years ago, but most have also heard of other pirates, such as Long John Silver and Captain Hook, even though these pirates never lived at all, except in literature. The differences between these two types of pirates - real and imaginary - are not quite as stark as we might think as the real, historical pirates are themselves somewhat legendary, somewhat fictional, belonging on the page and the stage rather than on the high seas. Based on extensive research of fascninating primary material, including testimonials, narratives, legal statements, colonial and mercantile records, Neil Rennie describes the ascertainable facts of real eighteenth-century pirate lives and then investigates how such facts were subsequently transformed artistically, by writers like Defoe and Stevenson, into realistic and fantastic fictions of various kinds: historical novels, popular melodramas, boyish adventures, Hollywood films. Rennie's aim is to watch, in other words, the long dissolve from Captain Kidd to Johnny Depp. There are surprisingly few scholarly studies of the factual pirates - properly analysing the basic manuscript sources and separating those documents from popular legends - and there are even fewer literary-historical studies of the whole crew of fictional pirates, although those imaginary pirates form a distinct and coherent literary tradition. Treasure Neverland is a study of this Scots-American literary tradition and also of the interrelations between the factual and fictional pirates - pirates who are intimately related, as the nineteenth-century writings about fictional pirates began with the eighteenth-century writings about supposedly real pirates. 'What I want is the best book about the Buccaneers', wrote Stevenson when he began Treasure Island in 1881. What he received, rightly, was indeed the best book: the sensational and unreliable History of the Pyrates (1724).
Swashbucklers is the first study of one of the most popular and enduring genres in television history – the costume adventure series. It maps the history of swashbuckling television from its origins in the 1950s to the present. It places the various series in their historical and institutional contexts and also analyses how the form and style of the genre has changed over time. And it includes case studies of major swashbuckling series including The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Buccaneers, Ivanhoe, William Tell, Zorro, Arthur of the Britons, Dick Turpin, Robin of Sherwood, Sharpe, Hornblower, The Count of Monte Cristo and the recent BBC co-production of The Three Musketeers.
The Handbook of Gender, Sex and Media offers original insights into the complex set of relations which exist between gender, sex, sexualities and the media, and in doing so, showcases new research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Brings together a collection of new, cutting-edge research exploring a number of different facets of the broad relationship between gender and media Moves beyond associating gender with man/woman and instead considers the relationship between the construction of gender norms, biological sex and the mediation of sex and sexuality Offers genuinely new insights into the complicated and complex set of relations which exist between gender, sex, sexualities and the media Essay topics range from the continuing sexism of TV advertising to ways in which the internet is facilitating the (re)invention of our sexual selves.
This book addresses a variety of issues through the examination of heroic figures in children's popular literature, comics, film, and television.