[ecrea] new book: Descended from Hercules - Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen, by Robert A. Rushing

*Descended from Hercules***

*Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen***

/Robert A. Rushing///

    "A pleasure to read, cover to cover. This book is smartly 
conceived, and written with elegant and persuasive prose." — David A. 
Gerstner, author of /Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male 
Homosexuality, and the Cinematic/

Muscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and 
tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 
1950s and 1960s.Using techniques like slow motion and stopped time, 
these films instill the hero’s vitality with timeless admiration and 
immerse the hero’s body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but 
without sexual desire. These"sword and sandal" films represent a 
century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention that offers the 
spectator an imagined form of the male body—one free of illness, 
degeneracy, and the burdens of poverty—that defends goodness with brute 
strength and perseverance, and serves as a model of ideal 
citizenry.Robert A. Rushing traces these epic heroes from Maciste in 
Cabiria in the early silent era to contemporary transnational figures 
like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, and to films such as 
Zach Snyder’s 300.Rushing explores how the very tactile modes of 
representation cement the genre’s ideological grip on the viewer.

*Robert A. Rushing*is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative 
Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he 
also holds affiliate appointments in Media and Cinema Studies and the 
Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is author of /Resisting 
Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture/ and co-editor of /Mad 
Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s/.

Indiana University Press | New Directions in National Cinemas | October 
2016| 230pp | 20 b&w illus. | 9780253022509 | Paperback | £21.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL217DFHL**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.

Author and independent bookshop blog - Bookscombined.com 
<https://bookscombined.com/>


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