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The book starts by placing the musical film and its audience into an overall historical/social context, setting forth the prime importance of the first musicals. It proposes the ways to reclaim these films from years of cultural/historical neglect through historical data as well as the use of reception theory to view the films within their proper context. The parameters of the book — time lines, genres, premises — are all established, as is the book's distinctive tone and style. The main vantage points are threefold: (1) Background and history; (2) A viewer's changing perceptions; (3) These works' precarious relationship with their audience.

Many of the risks that people take with their safety and health can be traced to the self. In particular, the desire to be perceived in particular ways by others often promotes risk-taking, leading people to do things that are dangerous to themselves or others. When people drive dangerously, show off with dangerous stunts, or succumb to peer pressure to engage in risky behaviors, they are often engaging in impression management (or self-presentation), trying to convey a particular impression of themselves to others. Similarly, when people engage in excessive suntanning, fail to practice safe sex, or drastically undereat (as in the case of anorexia), their concerns about how they appear to others may result in disease or death. Furthermore, self-reflection is often so aversive that people seek ways to escape it, engaging not only in relatively harmless escapism (such as napping, TV watching, and shopping) but in more extreme and detrimental forms of escape (including alcohol and drug use, masochism, and suicide). None of the dangerous and maladaptive behaviors examined in this chapter would be possible without the self.

This chapter shows how the war years witnessed a dramatic intensification of the ongoing tension between the integrative and disaggregating social potential of the mass media. On the one hand, the overall trend towards a more ‘common culture’ saw its apogee during the early years of the war as popular demand for film, radio, and the press soared. On the other hand, after 1942/3 the socially divisive potential of the media once again came to the fore in terms of content as well as the radical shifts in the wider societal context and how the media were consumed by audiences. Whereas the early war years witnessed an unprecedented social integration of audiences, after 1942 patterns of leisure and media consumption reflected the multiplying signs of social disintegration on the German home front.

This chapter considers the juxtaposition of sleeping potions and poisons, and their parallels with the uneasy relationship between comedy and tragedy in two plays by Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, the typically comic devices of the sleeping potion and the false death meet with fatal complications. Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, references to narcotically induced oblivion are identified with the seductive pleasures of Egypt and Cleopatra, yet ultimately lead to the lovers’ deaths rather than the happy ending of comedy. The chapter frames its readings of the plays around contemporary medical debates about narcotic drugs such as opium and mandragora. Looking at complaints from anti-theatrical tracts about the theater’s capacity to lull spectators into sleepy oblivion, it shows how the escapism of the theater was identified with the dangers of pleasurable narcotics.

The introduction examines the potential reasons for the critical neglect suffered by women’s magazines and more ‘popular’ genres generally. Conversely, it looks at why this genre remains so favoured by women writers and readers, and why women who never read books read magazines. It examines the fundamentally dialogic, ‘personal’ quality of women’s journals which points up their feminist potential for an ongoing and egalitarian negotiation between French women and the roles posited in the press destined for them. If the sheer regularity of publication and the often intimate nature of content serve to increase the impression of authenticity and overall proximity to the topical ‘dailiness’ of the French women readers the press seeks to attract, that relationship is not solely one of reflection: early journals not only mirror the current day-to-day reality of women’s position in French society but often endeavour to prescribe and promote non-conventional female figurations, particularly those journals with a feminist content. The book’s interest lies above all with the textual representations of women in the French press and how these adapt – or not – over the period in question; with how women’s political aims find expression; and with the dialogue established between woman writers and readers.

Produced in Venice in May 1813 to a libretto by Angelo Anelli previously used by Luigi Mosca, L’italiana in Algeri was the first full manifestation of Gioachino Rossini’s comic genius. Stendhal (Henry Beyle) thought it “perfection in the opera buffa style.” It was, he argued, an opera so rich in enchantment and sensual delight that critical judgment is actively suspended, a work of pure escapism “gay as our world is not.” This last point is an interesting one which might well be both sustained and contradicted by something like the great act I finale, where the characters are nonplussed and frozen in time before being released into a rising tide (the image of shipwreck is in the text) of rhythm and melody which finally engulfs them.

The nationalised DEFA (Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft) was East Germany's only film company. As in other areas of industrial production in the GDR, the annual output of films was planned many years in advance by the DEFA management, the aim being to produce a balanced package covering a variety of genres including musicals and comedies. This chapter focuses on how the communist authorities in East Germany attempted to compete with Western popular culture by producing socialist musicals that celebrated factory life and farm collectives in the period between 1958 and 1968. Interestingly, as the chapter points out, the conventions of escapism and fun remained central to these films, although Western ‘decadence’ was rejected in favour of a strong emphasis on women's emancipation, especially the right to work. This chapter looks at two film musicals directed by two East German filmmakers who specialised in entertainment films – Gottfried Kolditz's Revue um Mitternacht (Midnight Revue, 1962) and Joachim Hasler's Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968) – both of which were domestic box office hits.

Chapter 7, ‘Drop-outs’, examines two experiments in communal living in very different political contexts—London and Leningrad. It explores the creation of intimate spaces on the margins of conventional society in which freedom could be explored in its various forms. It asks whether dropping out was purely cultural, escapist and hedonistic, or the pursuit of a new kind of politics. Within these micro-societies in the West and East it explores different and contradictory attitudes in to imperialism, capitalism, property, democracy and sexual relations, the tensions these communities faced during their short lives and their enduring legacy.

The Postscript offers the beginning of an account of the point of artistic representation, if the main theory of the book is correct and fully general. What might the point of artistic representation in general be, if the Real-Likeness view applied to representation in all art forms? One point might be to provide a form of escapism: artistic representations would provide us with toy worlds into which we might escape: the details of this are explored a little here. But we might hope that artistic representations might help us to understand the real world; how they might do that is left unexplained.

The introduction examines how Bester’s unique approach challenged the paradigm of Golden Age science fiction. After a stint scripting comics and radio, Bester returned to the SF field in search of creative freedom; however, a conflict with legendary editor John W. Campbell over the story “Oddy and Id,” among other circumstances, prompted Bester to assume the stance of an outsider and write against the grain of the Astounding ethos, which he came to regard as escapist and scientistic. Bester wanted to write “arrest” fiction “full of romantic curiosity” that left ample opportunity for the reader to cogenerate meaning and experience the euphoria of raw imagination. Bester’s approach is discussed in terms of Roland Barthes’s distinction between “readable” and “writable” fiction.

This chapter introduces kwaito, describing its fundamental musical processes. It lays out the book’s main thesis that kwaito is less a form of escapism than a doubling of sensory reality, and then situates that argument theoretically within music studies, aesthetics, and political theory. As an introductory text, the chapter also provides relevant history related to South African music and politics and reflects on my approach as a white ethnographer in the intensely racialized environment of post-apartheid South Africa.

This chapter covers Allen’s films from 2000 (Small Time Crooks) through Melinda and Melinda, using the latter film to comment on his twentieth-century penchant to favor drama over comedy. The alternating drama/comedy versions of Melinda and Melindasuggest a balanced perspective on genre and a refusal on the part of the framing adjudicators to declare one or the other more representative of human experience, Louise declaring that the generic versions simply reflect the subjectivities of their projectors. But the chapter contends that Allen’s darkening vision has made effective comedy increasingly difficult for him to write, with comedies such as The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoopoften appearing on his list of least successful films, while he rates the grim murder drama Match Pointamong his very best films.

From early 1937, attacks on Mandelstam appeared in the local Voronezh press. The story of adapting to exile and escape from his political plight connects the poems of the notebooks. The chapter examines how the works written in that year explore the various prospects for survival, haunted by the example of homelessness of Schubert’s Winterreise. These experiences drive Mandelstam to consider whether the extensive reach of Stalin can ever be evaded, plotting whether flight might lead to freedom. The remaining possibility might be to surrender politically and submit to Stalin, seeking pardon. The book circles back to Mandelstam’s relation to the revolution by examining his late poem, the ‘Stalin Ode’, one of the most controversial poems in the Russian language, read here as a work of ironic defiance that manipulates panegyric subversively and closes off any possibility of rapprochement. Mandelstam’s final lyrics imagine flight into invisible realms.

This chapter delineates the political and ideological issues surrounding teenage protagonists in horror films. Pointing to many films’ self-conscious and often politically astute articulation of social class, gender, and race, it exonerates the American teen horror film from its critical dismissal as adolescent escapism or shameless pandering to the youth demographic.

In chapter 6 objections to these material romanticisms and to the narrative about romanticism and technology are constructed. First, drawing on classic anti-romantics, the argument is constructed that romanticism leads to escapism or what I call cyber narcissism. Then a position is elaborated that criticizes the current material romanticism for not being romantic enough, for failing to reach the romantic aims. It is argued that our hyper-romanticism in the form of Web 2.0 and its social media risks to destroy its very aims. It is concluded that, seen from these perspectives, material romanticism’s promise of a synthesis of enlightenment and romanticism is not kept and there is no “end of the machine” in sight. However, then it is argued that the criticisms discussed here may well be anti-romantic, but largely (but not completely and not always) remain within the “romantic order”. The chapter draws on Coyne’s reading of the phenomenological tradition in order to start exploring what a less dualistic and less romantic view would look like. The chapter ends with a summary of what we can nevertheless learn from the romantic tradition.