Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.

Ever since the shocking revelations of the fascist ties of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism’s infatuation with fascism has been extensive and widespread. He questions postmodernism’s claim to have inherited the mantle of the Left, suggesting instead that it has long been enamored with the opposite end of the political spectrum. Wolin reveals how, during in the 1930s, C. G. Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot were seduced by fascism's promise of political regeneration and how this misapprehension affected the intellectual core of their work. The result is a compelling and unsettling reinterpretation of the history of modern thought. In a new preface, Wolin revisits this illiberal intellectual lineage in light of the contemporary resurgence of political authoritarianism.

As he demonstrates that narratives of seduction function as a master plot for French literature in the eighteenth century, Paul Young argues that the prevalence of this trope was a reaction to a dominant cultural discourse that coded the novel and the new practice of solitary reading as dangerous, seductive practices. Situating his study in the context of paintings, educational manuals, and criticism that caution against the act of reading, Young considers both canonical and lesser-known works by authors that include Rousseau, Sade, Bastide, Laclos, Crébillon fils, and the writers of two widely read libertine novels. How these authors responded to a cultural climate that viewed literature, and especially the novel, as seductive, sheds light on the perils and pleasures of authorship, the ways in which texts interact with the larger cultural discourse, and what eighteenth-century texts tell us about the dangers of reading or writing. Ultimately, Young argues, the seduction not in the text, but by the text raises questions about the nature of pleasure in eighteenth-century French literature and culture.

"By exposing the literary motifs of subversion and seduction inherent in these works as disruptive to the flow, circulation, and expansion of value, A Passion for Consumption positions American literary culture as an extension of commodity economics."--BOOK JACKET.

She vowed to resist . . . It's difficult enough for Lady Clara Stanbourne to run her London home for reformed young pickpockets without having to contend with a criminal rightnext door! The mysterious Morgan Pryce is obviouslydealing in stolen property, and she will never allowthe handsome scoundrel to lead the children astray.Pryce is very much mistaken if he believes her adelicate rose he can wilt with passionate, unspokenpromises. Now if only Clara could douse the fieryyearning the charming cad ignites inside her. His heated caresses . . . This bold, beautiful temptress is indeed a distraction—and Morgan wishes he could tell the exquisite Clarathe truth: that he is working undercover to break upa notorious crime ring. His mind should be on hisduty—not wondering how it would feel to hold Clarain his arms and taste her luscious lips. But nowthat she has entered into his most dangerous game,Morgan knows he must have her, despite the veryreal peril to his secret mission—andto his heart.

Once upon a time, Faith Sullivan dreamed of being a famous painter who lived in an apartment overlooking Central Park. Unfortunately, life had other ideas and at 26, she’s still running, working and living at Sully’s, her family’s traditional Irish pub in Brooklyn with her stubborn, ailing father. And she was perfectly fine with her lot until suddenly her three best friends each found their prince, and her own happily ever after seemed like another dream lost. Until one day a long, tall Australian walks into her bar and her loved-up besties decided to play Fairy Godmothers. Ex pro-surfer turned beer baron, Rafael Quartermaine is in New York for a month on business. He’s looking for a pub to launch Baron lager on the American market and Sully’s is perfect. All he has to do is convince Faith, the traditionalist, to say yes. And once he’s done that, maybe he can convince her that all work and no play makes Faith a dull girl. Faith’s connection to her family and Sully’s is absolute, and Raf’s business drive and itchy feet aren’t conducive to long term, so it should be an easy break when duty calls Faith back into the fold on the evening of the ball. But running out on the baron is harder than she ever imagined… Will their fling sizzle out, or become something more?

Gautier's poetry merits an attentive reading which respects his own essential criterion of poeticity, namely, textuality. This is a poetry which puts on display its literariness, that is, its existence as cultural artifact. In so doing, however, it also puts on display the absence of and its resistance to whatever personal or real signified it would evoke or name. Its beauty and self-indulgent pleasure reveal their hollowness and inadequacy. Its chiseled, polished surface renders its borders or limits and its play unsatisfyingly and teasingly perceptible. Its very superficiality allows, invites and seduces the reader to go entre les lignes and perceive the mystery, not of what has been symbolically buried/unburied, concealed/revealed, but of the truly absent, the abîmes superficiels. Chapter 1, focusing on texts from the Poésies of 1830, studies the intextual repetition of Gautier's poetry, the citations, imitations and transpositions which make evident the poetry's displacement of the significant and the personal into aesthetic simulacra. Chapter 2 deals with the poems of Gautier's second collection, Albertus, and analyzes the use of allegory and of humor as further markers of textual substitution. The inherent lifelessness and illusoriness of the textual artifact is revealed in the poems of La Comédie de la Mort, the collection examined in chapter 3. Chapter 4 analyzes the so-called descriptive, referential poetry of España, and finds that the monde extérieur of Gautier's poetry functions to express an absence of self and is itself always shown to be other than the Other. The dimunition of the poetic effected in Emaux et Camées is the subject of chapter 5, and chapter 6 deals with the contextuality, the fetishism, and the eroticism revealed in a miscellany of poems - in particular the libertine poems - which do not figure in Gautier's five major collections. By short-circuiting significations and transforming them into seductive appearances, Gautier reveals himself to be the acknowledged maître of both Baudelaire and Mallarmé.