Product Description: As a uniquely hybrid form of artistic output, straddling music and theatre and high and popular culture, opera offers vast research possibilities not only in the field of music studies but also in the fields of media and cultural studies...read more

Product Description: This 1986 study of Manon Lescaut draws on various debates in the fields of psychoanalysis, feminism and literary criticism. It has two principal aims: to analyse this story of a young man's passion for a femme fatale as it is presented by the narrator; and to suggest ways in which feminist criticism can help explain how the text operates...read more

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Product Description: Gide's sexuality was explicitly central to everything he wrote, but it was complex, moved as much by undesire as desire and the fascination for crime, education, virtue, or play. Naomi Segal traces the fluidity of motivation throughout his fiction and nonfiction, through the analogy of the mechanical processes of the male body...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Exploring the fascination exerted by adultery throughout the long history of western cultures, this text focuses on the bourgeois 19th century as the high age of representations of adultery. It also offers historicist and psychoanalytic analyses of texts like 'Fatal Attraction' and 'The Piano'.

Product Description: This book examines the relation between mothers and their sons and daughters and the way in which these relations are expressed in fictional texts. In male-authored novels of adultery in French, English, German and Russian, the desired woman often has sons to whom she is tied more bindingly than to her husband; a more direct rival to the lover, a son often falls ill and potentially threatens the affair - thus the woman is kept after all within the patriarchal chain...read more

"Narcissus and Echo" is about romantic confessional fiction, in which the woman dies and the man lives to tell "his" tale. Whether femme fatale, nun, sister, aristocrat or fallen women, she is always somehow blamed for her own destruction. What motivates the man's narrative and how does the women's voice, curiously, survive the text? Naomi Segal brings insights from feminist and psychoanalytic theory to bear on writers such as Chateaubriand, Musset, Prevost and Gautier. Running throughout this lively and provocative study are dichotomies between speech and sight, male "doubles" and female "mirror", the narcissism of nostalgia and the paradoxes of undesire. " ...humorous, consistently provocative and always demanding ..." Times Literary Supplement; "With humour and breathtaking pace she blasts her way through ten canonical examples ...Segal is a feminist critic who ...enjoys reading the grain", French Studies; "Narcissus and Echo is a stimulating and extremely well documented book", Journal of European Studies.