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Former 'comfort woman' at an American base in Korea re-writes her history into something supernatural.

Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies have enshrined Tolkien's work in a format that for future generations may likely become their first, if not the sole exposure to Tolkien's world. This essay examines the three The Hobbit films, arguing that Jackson's adaptation jettisons the criteria of truth-of-correspondence and truth-of-coherence in favor of spectacle, thereby inevitably transforming how Tolkien's novel will be (mis)remembered and (re)interpreted. Jackson's version is explored as a swerve informed by the director's predilection for a blend of horror and the comico-nonsensical as well as by his fascination with computer game aesthetics. The bloated trilogy is discussed as a beautiful disaster with serious long-term consequences for Tolkien's book and as a missed chance to reimagine The Hobbit as a global and multicultural story.

Rearick discusses the dark face of racism examined in J. R. R. Tolkien's work. It is undeniable that darkness and the color black are continually associated throughout Tolkien's universe with unredeemable evil, specifically Orcs and the Dark Lord Sauron. So unredeemable is this evil, in fact, that especially in encounters with the Orcs during the war's action, it is dealt with by extermination.

ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS, often considered her finest and most psychologically complex novel, tells its story through narrative indirection–what Gaskell's heroine Molly Gibson identifies in a conversation late in the novel as telling a story with a “mental squint; the surest way to spoil a narration” (623; ch. 58). In this conversation, Molly is conscious of her audience–her admiring and encouraging aunts and her less admiring and less encouraging stepmother. Like Gaskell, Molly is conscious of the presence of a “critical listening.” Thus Molly selects which details of her visit to the Towers, the manor of the largest landowners in her town, she will relate. In examining the use of details, of particulars, in Victorian and Modernist poetry, Carol Christ makes clear that what is at stake is “not whether literature should contain detail but what the significance of the detail should be, and consequently what the criteria for its selection are” (4). Gaskell's realist domestic fiction delights in detail. Yet Gaskell has been taken to task by such critics as Virginia Woolf for an incidental and excessive use of detail, detail that for Woolf represents the mid-Victorian novelist's inability to select what is important in rendering reality. The aesthetic problem with detail, Naomi Schor explains, lies in the way that detail subverts internal hierarchic ordering by blurring the lines between the foreground and the background, the principle and the incidental (20–21). Schor's explanation of this internal subversion is useful for opening up Gaskell's use of detail in Wives and Daughters.

Audio is perhaps the most vital component in the construction of horror films; from the child’s lullaby inProfondo rosso/Deep Red(Dario Argento, 1975), Bernard Herrmann’s use of stingers in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), to themusique concrèteofThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre(Tobe Hooper, 1974), the canon of great horror films are inextricably tied and indebted to their soundtracks. And yet despite the importance of this audio-visual synchronicity, Italian horror soundtracks in particular have endured not only as part of the films they were made to complement, but also independently of them. With Goblin embarking on their first US

Postmodern filmmaking practices provide part of the explanation for the performative spectatorship fostered by Euro horror cinema, but not a full account. For that, we need to consider the uniquely performative ways in which Euro horror movies are now being watched in the United States. To a certain extent, film viewing always involves an element of performativity. In her phenomenological account of the cinematic experience, Vivian Sobchack appropriates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of the “intertwining” or “chiasmus” of subject and object that takes place at the moment of perception in order to argue that watching a movie should be thought of

In May 1993, the Italian publisher Adelphi published a novel by Anna Maria Ortese with the cryptic titleIl cardillo addolorato.¹ It had an astonishing success: in its first two months, it was reprinted four times and sold 60,000 copies – in time that would become 90,000, with an additional 22,000 copies sold in mass-market format – impressive numbers for a work of fiction of this type in the Italian market. It is worth keeping in mind how these figures compared with the 4,000 copies ofL’Iguanasold in one year by Rizzoli – they republished the book ten years

Recent attempts to expand the geographic domain of American literature to include Latin America have proven to be limited. The metamorphosis of the ordinary in Dominican short fiction is discussed.

Only recently literary criticism has assigned to the trilogy by Anna Maria Ortese,L’Iguana(1965),Il cardillo addolorato(1993), andAlonso e i visionari(1996), a key position within the author’s work, and particularly within her non-realistic prose. Although Ortese’s non-realistic prose is, as we shall see, quite unique, it relates to the rich tradition of the fantastic novel that started with the Scapigliatura production in the late nineteenth century, namely withI racconti fantastici(1869) by Ugo Tarchetti. Since then, the fantastic novel had many diversified outcomes, but it always reflected existential doubts and an anxiety towards the new