Book Review: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola is a comprehensive overview of where the field currently stands. If the first wave of Coppola scholarship has been concerned with explicating her genius, then the critiques included in Handbook to Sofia Coppola help to widen the scope of the field. So, too, do readings that place her creative practice in broader cultural contexts
Book Review: Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism’s Indelible Mark
Edward Jackson reviews Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism’s Indelible Mark, which examines Haynes’s long-standing feminist commitments and his exceptional career as a director of women’s films.
Book Review: Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro.
Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature is a challenging collection of essays that should reverberate throughout the field. Readers will find a range of insights here into how recent American fiction, in editors Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro’s words, ‘models and interrogates the neoliberal present’ (1).
Book Review: The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age by Alison Phipps
Two anecdotes in the opening pages of Alison Phipps’s The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age set the scene for what is a thorough, if at times frustrating, investigation into the ‘difficulties of positioning for contemporary feminist theory and activism’ (2).
Book Review: Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction by Peter Ferry
Ferry weaves his exploration of masculinity in the works of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Elllis’ American Psycho, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis around the figure of the flâneur.
Conference Review: ‘Not Your Average Superhero’
The three panellists, Zara Dinnen, Tony Venezia and Daniel Rourke, set out to explore superheroics not on the cinema screen, but behind the keyboard, in the literary novel, and in relation to digital technologies.