Diane Negra
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800859302
- eISBN:
- 9781800852402
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800859302.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow of a Doubt even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analyzing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, ...
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This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow of a Doubt even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analyzing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship and social history, knowledge and epistemology, homesickness and “family values,” it shows how impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content. In a related way it illustrates how the film’s terrors have to do with the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. Finally it understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centered Hitchcock text and a milestone film not only because it marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life but because it opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.Less
This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow of a Doubt even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analyzing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship and social history, knowledge and epistemology, homesickness and “family values,” it shows how impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content. In a related way it illustrates how the film’s terrors have to do with the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. Finally it understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centered Hitchcock text and a milestone film not only because it marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life but because it opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.
