(H/B) THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Παρουσίαση

This comprehensive analytical study of the Phantom of the Opera proposes answers to the question, "why do we keep needing this story told and retold in the Western world?" by revealing the history of deep cultural tensions that underlie the novel and each of its major adaptations. Using extensive historical and textual evidence and drawing on perspectives from several theories of cultural studies, this book argues that we need this tale told and reconfigured because it provides us ways to both confront and disguise how we have fashioned our senses of identity in the Western middle class. The Phantom of the Opera - in varying ways over time - turns out, like the "Gothic" tradition it extends, to be deeply connected to Western self-fashioning in the face of conflicted attitudes about class, gender, race, religious beliefs, Fruedian psychology, economic and international tensions, and especially the shifting and permeable boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. This book should interest all students of the history of Western culture, Gothic fiction, opera, musical theater, and film. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

First Part - The Novel: Leroux's Distinctive Choices and their Wider Contexts
The Original Fantome's Mysteries: An Introduction
The Psychoanalytic Veneer in the Novel: Le Fantome's "Unconscious Depths" and their Social Foundations
Leroux's Sublimations of Politics: From Degeneration and the Suppression of Carnival to the Abjection of Mixed "Otherness"
The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux's Fantome and the Cultural Work of the Gothic
Second Part - The Major Adaptations: Neo-Gothic Sublimations of Changing Cultural Fears
Universal's Silent Film: The Recast Scapegoat, the Quest for the Widest Audience, and the Management of Labor
The 1943 Remake: Recombining Film Styles, Struggling with Psychoanalysis, and Sanitizing World War II
The Culture of Adolescence: The Lloyd Webber Musical and the Adaptations that Paved the Way, 1962-1986
Different Phantoms for Different Problems: Some Adaptations Since the Musical
The Phantom's Lasting Significance: An Assessment of its Cultural Functions