Sexual Visuality From Literature To Film 1850-1950

Book excerpt: A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality. Denisoff's study explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and noir literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the visual in order to challenge sex- and gender-based assumptions that marginalized certain people and desires. Addressing authors and directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virigina Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, this study shows that what a society gets is often what it tries hardest not to see.