Faulkner's subject

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Todd McGowan

Since the release of Do the Right Thing in 1989, Spike Lee has established himself as a cinematic icon. Lee's mostly independent films garner popular audiences while at the same time engaging in substantial political and social commentary. He is arguably the most accomplished African American filmmaker in cinematic history, and his breakthrough paved the way for the success of many other African Americans in film. In this first single-author scholarly examination of Spike Lee's oeuvre, Todd McGowan shows how Lee's films, from She's Gotta Have It through Red Hook Summer, address crucial social issues such as racism, paranoia, and economic exploitation in a formally inventive manner. McGowan argues that Lee uses excess in his films to intervene in issues of philosophy, politics, and art.

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Robert Descharnes, Gilles Néret

The seminal surrealist: Exploring Dalí's grandiose and grotesque oeuvre Picasso called Dalí "an outboard motor that’s always running." Dalí thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics—and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This publication presents the entire painted oeuvre of Salvador Dalí. After many years of research, Robert Descharnesand Gilles Néret finally located all the paintings of this highly prolific artist. Many of the works had been inaccessible for years—in fact so many that almost half the illustrations in this book had rarely been seen.

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Brenda Daly

Joyce Carol Oates's authorial voice is lavishly diverse. In her works she divides herself into many voices, many persons. This up-to-date examination of Oates's novels argues that the father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers. Oates's struggle to resist and transform male-defined literary conventions is often mirrored by the struggles of her female characters to resist and transform social conventions.

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Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener

Holbein was a hugely ambitious artist, and even during his formative years in Lucerne and Basle undertook to make designs for jewelry, stained glass and woodcuts as well as to paint major altarpieces and portraits. He also carried out several monumental decorative schemes for private houses and civic buildings. This book offers both a remarkable range of extant visual evidence and a rewarding and scholarly account of Holbein's oeuvre in its full historical and artistic contexts. In addition, the authors include a reappraisal of the high reputation in which Holbein was held during the centuries following his death, as illustrated by the opinion expressed by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard and the searches undertaken by the French collector Charles Patin, and by the remarks and exertions of the wealthy eighteenth-century dilettante Horace Walpole.