Books by Elisabeth Bronfen

Reinvestigates medical writings and cultural performance to reveal the continued relevance of a disorder thought to be a romantic formulation of the past. Through a critical rereading, this book develops a concept of hysteria, one that challenges traditional gender-based theories linking it to dissatisfied feminine sexual desire.

Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home-and the power to get there-had been with her all along. This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home, and the comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire. Leading us on a journey through American film, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes a close reading of such classic films as Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Burton's Batman Returns, Hitchcock's Rebecca, Ford's The Searchers, and Sayles's Lone Star.

Addresses the question of how identity is formed as a result of corporeal and cultural positioning, by mapping Dorothy Richardson's early modernist text, Pilgrimage, against our postmodern interest in real and imagined geographies. -- .

The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women. -- .