Oppression by censorship affects the film industry far more frequently than any other mass media. Including essays by leading film historians, the book offers groundbreaking historical research on film censorship in major film production countries and explore such innovative themes as film censorship and authorship, religion, and colonialism.

Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.

Splendid's, a two-act police thriller written in 1948, was never staged in Jean Genet's lifetime. In 1952 he announced that he had destroyed the manuscript, and the play was assumed lost. Only in 1993 did a surviving copy reappear. Exhausted, unshaven and wearing evening dress, Genet's gangsters never let go of their machine-guns - not even when they dance together. Their conversations contain some of Genet's finest dialogue; an insane mixture of melodramatic speech-making and low-camp bickering, all wrapped up in a sexy pastiche of forties American film noir, lurching stylishly from tough realism into wicked black humour. Translated by writer, performer and director Neil Bartlett, this volume also contains an introduction by Genet's biographer, Edmund White.

"In the context of the continuing debate on the conundrum of fascism, it is significant that the themes of organic nationalism and anti-Semitism that were developed in Belle Epoque France not only fed subsequent forms of fascism (Italian and German) but were also to become a significant part of the discourse of French extreme-right and fascist movements and intellectuals during the interwar years. These themes were a driving force behind the anti-Semitic policies of Vichy and its involvement in the Final Solution. Some aspects of this ideological tradition have reappeared in postwar France and are notably identifiable in the ideology and political myths of the two National Front movements in contemporary France."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved