Books by Gaylyn Studlar

In Precocious Charms, Gaylyn Studlar examines how Hollywood presented female stars as young girls or girls on the verge of becoming women. Child stars are part of this study but so too are adult actresses who created motion picture masquerades of youthfulness. Studlar details how Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones, and Audrey Hepburn performed girlhood in their films. She charts the multifaceted processes that linked their juvenated star personas to a wide variety of cultural influences, ranging from Victorian sentimental art to New Look fashion, from nineteenth-century children's literature to post-World War II sexology, and from grand opera to 1930s radio comedy. By moving beyond the general category of "e;woman,"e; Precocious Charms leads to a new understanding of the complex pleasures Hollywood created for its audience during the half century when film stars were a major influence on America's cultural imagination.

Studlar looks at four major Hollywood male stars of the silent era--Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, and Lon Chaney--to illuminate the cultural, ideological, and historical implications of these stars in relation to contemporary debates over changing sexual and social norms.

This textual analysis of the six Paramount films directed by Josef von Sternberg which starred Marlene Dietrich, probes the source of their visual and psychological complexity. It illustrates how masochism extends into the area of artistic form, language and the production of pleasure.