Books by Alumni:
> > Criticism

Mary Louis Charnon-Deutsch, PhD'78, Fictions of the Feminine in the 19th-Century Spanish Press (Penn State University Press). Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture. She organizes 190 images reproduced in the book into six broad categories, reading women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions.

Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet Klotman Cutler, AB'70, editors, Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video (Indiana University Press). Contributors explore how more than 300 documentaries by some 250 African-American filmmakers reveal the aesthetic, economic, historical, political, and social forces that shape the lives of black Americans.

Philip C. Kolin, AM'67, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (Cambridge University Press). Kolin chronicles the history of Streetcar productions from 1947 to 1998, surveying major national premieres by leading directors and analyzing interpretations by black and gay theater companies and by other art forms, including ballet and television.

William Frank Monroe Sr., PhD'82, Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation (University of Illinois Press). Monroe outlines a new approach, which he calls "virtue criticism." Using this framework, he demonstrates that works of alienation by authors such as T. S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov are filled not only with belligerence but also with the virtues of trust and solidarity with the reader.

Alice Arnott Oppen, MAT'63, Shakespeare: Listening to the Women (Seaview Press). Oppen provides the writings of Renaissance women to verify the voices of several of Shakespeare's female characters, shedding light on what it was like to be a woman in 1600 and on whether Shakespeare represented women as they saw themselves.