Books by Mandy Merck

In this series of provocative essays on culture, art, and film, former Screen editor Mandy Merck explores the paradoxes of sexual representation. Whether writing on romantic fiction or hardcore pornography, on robots or sex goddesses, Radclyffe Hall or the Marquis de Sade, she finds the perversions and deviances. Illustrated.

At a time when "sexy" can be an adjective for anything, the actual representation of sex is still deemed confrontational, aggressive, and "in your face". In readings ranging across film, drama, opera, fine art and critical theory, Mandy Merck provides a series of studies on this phenomena.

Hollywood's obsession with the tale of American greed, justice, religion and sexual hypocrisy stretches across the history of cinema. This title studies this extraordinary sequence of adaptations. It reveals a history of Hollywood of American culture and the difficulty of telling an American tragedy in the land of the American dream.