A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock / Edition 1

by Thomas Leitch, Leland Poague

Overview

The most comprehensive volume ever published on Alfred Hitchcock, covering his career and legacy as well as the broader cultural and intellectual contexts of his work.

• Contains thirty chapters by the leading Hitchcock scholars
• Covers his long career, from his earliest contributions to other directors’ silent films to his last uncompleted last film
• Details the enduring legacy he left to filmmakers and audiences alike

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781118797006
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	03/17/2014
Series:	Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Thomas Leitch is Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where he directs the Film Studies Program.

Leland Poague is Professor of English at Iowa State University

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Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors x

Introduction 1
Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague

Part I Background 9

1. Hitchcock’s Lives 11
Thomas Leitch

2. Hitchcock’s Literary Sources 28
Ken Mogg

3. Hitchcock and Early Filmmakers 48
Charles Barr

4. Hitchcock’s Narrative Modernism: Ironies of Fictional Time 67
Thomas Hemmeter

Part II Genre 87

5. Hitchcock and Romance 89
Lesley Brill

6. Family Plots: Hitchcock and Melodrama 109
Richard R. Ness

7. Conceptual Suspense in Hitchcock’s Films 126
Paula Marantz Cohen

Part III Collaboration 139

8. “Tell Me the Story So Far”: Hitchcock and His Writers 141
Leland Poague

9. Suspicion: Collusion and Resistance in the Work of Hitchcock’s Female Collaborators 162
Tania Modleski

10. A Surface Collaboration: Hitchcock and Performance 181
Susan White

Part IV Style 199

11. Aesthetic Space in Hitchcock 201
Brigitte Peucker

12. Hitchcock and Music 219
Jack Sullivan

13. Some Hitchcockian Shots 237
Murray Pomerance

Part V Development 253

14. Hitchcock’s Silent Cinema 255
Sidney Gottlieb

15. Gaumont Hitchcock 270
Tom Ryall

16. Hitchcock Discovers America: The Selznick-Era Films 289
Ina Rae Hark

17. From Transatlantic to Warner Bros. 309
David Sterritt

18. Hitchcock, Metteur-en-scène: 1954–60 329
Joe McElhaney

19. The Universal Hitchcock 347
William Rothman

Part VI Auteurism 365

20. French Hitchcock, 1945–55 367
James M. Vest

21. Lost in Translation? Listening to the Hitchcock–Truffaut Interview 387
Janet Bergstrom

22. Robin Wood’s Hitchcock 405
Harry Oldmeadow

Part VII Ideology 425

23. Accidental Heroes and Gifted Amateurs: Hitchcock and Ideology 427
Toby Miller with Noel King

24. Hitchcock and Feminist Criticism: From Rebecca to Marnie 452
Florence Jacobowitz

25. Queer Hitchcock 473
Alexander Doty

Part VIII Ethics 491

26. Hitchcock and Philosophy 493
Richard Gilmore

27. Hitchcock’s Ethics of Suspense: Psychoanalysis and the Devaluation of the Object 508
Todd McGowan

28. Occasions of Sin: The Forgotten Cigarette Lighter and Other Moral Accidents in Hitchcock 529
George Toles

Part IX Beyond Hitchcock 553

29. Hitchcock and the Postmodern 555
Angelo Restivo

30. Hitchcock’s Legacy 572
Richard Allen

Index 592

What People are Saying About This

Crispin N'Landa

“This impressive anthology proves that there are plenty of new things to say about Hitchcock. A wide ranging and consistently intelligent compendium, it features essays on virtually every aspect of the great director's work by an array of his most astute commentators.”
James Naremore, Indiana University

“A superior addition to film studies, with essays from scholarly voices both established and new. Hitchcock specialists - and others - will find much to enlighten, discuss and debate.”
Leonard J. Leff, Oklahoma State University

“The authoritative cultural and historical perspectives of the essays, written by prominent scholars, provide an ideal complement to Robin Wood’s close readings of Hitchcock’s films.”
Elisabeth Weis, author of The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track

"Readers who know a lot about Hitchcock will find this new Companion hard to put down, and neophytes could not find a better introduction to the ever-changing, ever-surprising field of Hitchcock studies."
Bill Krohn

"Poague and Leitch’s A Companion to Hitchcock provides an excellent snapshot of the best and brightest current thinking on Hitchcock by a range of international scholars who offer new ideas about his life and work—his status as an auteur and his engagement with his collaborators, his unique stylistic concerns and his indebtedness to generic conventions, his moral vision and the ideological effects of his narrative choices."
John Belton, Rutgers University