In Genius Envy, Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten history: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed the phenomenon of genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.” Despite the efforts of leading thinkers, critics, and literary historians to erase women from the pages of literary history, Paliyenko shows how these female poets invigorated the debate about the origins of genius and garnered considerable recognition in their time for their creativity and bold aesthetic ideas. This fresh account of French women poets’ contributions to literature probes the history of their critical reception. The result is an encounter with the texts of celebrated writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anaïs Ségalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, and Louise Ackermann. Glimpses at the different stages of each poet’s career show that these women explicitly challenged the notion of genius as gender specific, thus advocating for their rightful place in the canon. A prodigious contribution to studies of nineteenth-century French poetry, Paliyenko’s book reexamines the reception of poetry by women within and beyond its original context. This balanced and comprehensive treatment of their work uncovers the multiple ways in which women poets sought to define their place in history.

This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger's engrossing production history of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, is a major contribution to the study of Eisenstein and thus informs the history and theory of cinema and the study of Soviet culture and politics. Neuberger's ability to mine, interpret, and connect Eisenstein's voluminous, intriguingly digressive writings makes this book exceptional.— Karla Oeler, Stanford University Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making, and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative, and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique, and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Neuberger's bold arguments and daring insights into every aspect of Eisenstein's work during this period, together with her ability to lucidly connect his wide-ranging late theory with his work on Ivan, show the director exploiting the institutions of Soviet artistic production not only to expose the cruelties of Stalin and his circle but to challenge the fundamental principles of Soviet ideology itself. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

Theorieën van de Russische filmregisseur (1898-1948) over de vele mogelijkheden van het medium film

During the 1920s and ’30s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, In Excess reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film ¡Que Viva Mexico! Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein’s oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, Masha Salazkina situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, Salazkina explains how Eisenstein’s engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein’s bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, In Excess provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master’s theories and aesthetics.

The Gendered Lyric portrays gender as being central to the full appreciation of nineteenth-century French poetry. Schultz contends that both male and female poets of the major movements relied on sexual difference to define their poetic.

This work is an examination of the text and context of five ninteenth-century French women poets: Elisa Mercoeur (1808-1835), Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), Louisa Siefert (1845-1877), Louise Ackermann (1813-1890) and Louise Michel (1830-1905).

The first comprehensive book on the extensive, yet rarely seen, graphic works of pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein Sergei Eisenstein is regarded as one of cinema’s greatest revolutionaries. Less well known is that he was also a prolific graphic artist who drew compulsively as a means of expressing his ideas. Arranged chronologically, Eisenstein on Paper is divided into six chapters, each prefaced by short texts relating to the graphic works of each distinct period, and interwoven with excerpts from Eisenstein’s own essays and diary entries. In 1930 Eisenstein traveled to the United States and then Mexico, where he produced hundreds of drawings influenced by ancient and contemporary Mexican art. Forced to return to Russia in 1932, Eisenstein came under the scrutiny of the Communist government and, struggling to make further films without political interference, turned again to sketching for artistic freedom. By the end of his life, he had pared his style down to the utmost simplicity and sincerity. Despite completing relatively few films in his lifetime, Eisenstein made several thousand drawings. Eisenstein on Paper is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration with RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Arts and Literature, and is a fitting tribute to an incredible graphic talent.