The influential cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema, and visual culture. The crossmappings in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power.

Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel not only from one historical moment to the next, but also from one medium to another. Following Bronfen on these journeys into the cultural imaginary, the reader encounters prominent artists such as Edgar Degas, Francesca Woodman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso and William Shakespeare, alongside Classical Hollywood's film noir and melodrama, and the TV series The Wire and House of Cards.

Brilliant essays on the female nude, on images not just of chess games but of chess queens in recent film and television ... full of marvelous and disturbing ideas ... Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English & American Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, USA. She is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century literature and her books on psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic; The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents; Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film; Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema; and Mad Men, Death and the American Dream.