Description
Book SynopsisCinematic Illuminations offers medievalists, literary and cultural theorists, and film theorists and buffs a fresh approach to understanding how popular culture interprets and makes use of the past through the medium of film.
Trade ReviewOne of the most refreshing aspects of this book is that Finke and Shichtman combine encyclopedic knowledge of and masterful control over their material-including but not limited to film studies, medieval literature and history, and popular culture-with nuanced analysis, deft prose, and a palpable enjoyment of the topic. The authors are clearly having a grand time and invite readers to join in. -- Mary K. Ramsey Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 2010 Through Finke and Shichtman's use of film theory and cinema criticism, along with their sensitive deployment of medieval historical and literary details, the Middle Ages emerges as a period production in this excellent and innovative study. -- Holly A. Crocker Speculum 2011
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Theory and Methods of Cinematic Medievalism
1. Traversing the Fantasy: Screening the Middle Ages
2. Signs of the Medieval: A Sociological Stylistics of Film
3. Celluloid History: Cinematic Fidelity and Infidelity
Part 2: The Politics of Cinematic Medievalism
4. Mirror of Princes: Representations of Political Authority in Medieval Films
5. The Politics of Hagiography: Joan of Arc on the Screen
6. The Hagiography of Politics: Mourning in America
7. The Crusades: War of the Cross or God's Own Bloodbath?
Part 3: Cinematic Medievalism and the Anxieties of Modernity
8. Looking Awry at the Grail: Mourning Becomes Modernity
9. Apocalyptic Medievalism: Rape and Disease as Figures of Social Anomie
10. Forever Young: The Teen Middle Ages
Notes
Bibliography
Index
