In works by filmmakers from Bertolucci to Spielberg, debauched images of nazi and fascist eroticism, symbols of violence and immorality, often bear an uncanny resemblance to the images and symbols once used by the fascists themselves to demarcate racial, sexual, and political others. This book exposes the "madness" inherent in such a course, which attests to the impossibility of disengaging visual and rhetorical constructions from political, ideological, and moral codes. Kriss Ravetto argues that contemporary discourses using such devices actually continue unacknowledged rhetorical, moral, and visual analogies of the past. Against postwar fictional and historical accounts of World War II in which generic images of evil characterize the nazi and the fascist, Ravetto sets the more complex approach of such filmmakers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, and Lina Wertmuller. Her book asks us to think deeply about what it means to say that we have conquered fascism, when the aesthetics of fascism still describe and determine how we look at political figures and global events. Book jacket.

The 120 Days of Sodom is the Marquis de Sade's masterpiece. A still unsurpassed catalogue of sexual perversions and the first systematic exploration of the psychopathology of sex, it was written during Sade's lengthy imprisonment for sexual deviancy and blasphemy and then lost after the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789. Later rediscovered, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1936 and is now introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay, 'Must We Burn Sade?' Unique in its enduring capacity to shock and provoke, The 120 Days of Sodom must stand as one of the most controversial books ever written, and a fine example of the Libertine novel, a genre inspired by eroticism and anti-establishmentarianism, that effectively ended with the French Revolution.

The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of his ideas and the details of his troubled personal life from 1950, when he settled in Rome, to 1975, the year of his brutal murder, apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute. "In her concise and sympathetic book, Greene intelligently explicates the political and social context within which Pasolini became both a leading figure and a significant heretic. He was an atheist who directed one of the few genuinely profound biblical films in the cinema, a communist who severely criticized many of the radical movements of modern Italy. Though he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, he privately referred to it as his "sickness." As the book well documents, Pasolini was not a rebel but rather an authentic heretic who worked in contradiction to both his medium and milieu."--Choice Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Since its appearance in 1992, Barth David Schwartz's biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) has been the standard reference and starting point for anyone embarking on a study of Pasolini in English, situating the multimedia artist within twentieth-century Italian and world culture. Pasolini was unique among his contemporaries--Federico Fellini, for example, didn't write novels, Giorgio Bassani did not direct films, and Eugenio Montale did not write popular journalism. Although Pasolini excelled at all of these genres, he was first and foremost a poet (see Chicago's bilingual edition of his selected poems from 2014). Whatever he was doing, Pasolini's poetry informed all aspects of his creative life, from his plays to his visual art, from his films to his political essays. In this second edition, which includes a new Afterword that contains material that has come to light since the early 1990s and revelations about Pasolini's last days, Schwartz introduces this multimedia artist to a new generation of scholars and students trying to negotiate the complexities of the Italian cultural landscape. As Susan Sontag wrote, Pasolini is "indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian Arts and letters since the Second World War." This new edition, revised and updated throughout, is a natural companion to our volume of poetry and, with the poems, will be a perennial seller for years to come.