Synopses & Reviews
This lively collection offers a wide-ranging exploration of the erotic and the fantastic in painting, illustration, and frilm. It covers Western art of six centuries--from medieval woodcuts to contemporary poster art--and the cinema of six decades--from horror classics of the 1930s to recent slasher films--documenting the surprising variety of guises in which sexuality appears in fantasy art and cinema. Among the subjects treated are occult eroticism in Medieval and Renaissance art; the use of fantasy as a vehicle for depicting erotic subjects in periods of sexual repression; the fascination with unconscious and aberrant sexuality in the visual arts since the publication of Freud's theories; movie monsters and aliens as emblems of the submerged id or libido; and monstrous metamorphosis as a symbol of the changes accompanying puberty.
Review
...There are some fine essays here. In the first section, `Theory,' Brooks Landon's essay on the shifts of feminine roles in three novels--SF, fantasy, mainstream--is nicely done. ... In the third, `Feminist Views,' all of the five essays are good--and the Lamb and Veith reconsideration of The Left Hand of Darkness is excellent. Palumbo's annotated primary and unannotated secondary bibliography is good. ... Feminist and SF collections will want this book--and so will, perhaps, sociological collections dealing with changing moral visions.Choice