Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture

New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. First Printing . Hard Back. Near Fine/Very Good. 6 1/4" x 9 1/4. 304 Pages Indexed. The essays in this collection break down the boundaries that separate film from literature, popular culture fromk lhigh culture, and analyzing and criticizing from teaching and understanding. Braudy views the critic not as a detached voice of professional authority but rather as a membere of a particular culture --- a native informant --- whose gaze looks simultaneously inward and outward, subjective but self-aware. He discusses a wide variety of subjects, including writers and filmmakers --- such as Hitchcock, Defoe, Lubitsch, Emile Zola, Sontage, and Richard Condon --- madness in the 18th centure, the Hollywood blacklist, westerns, pornography, the humanities, and teaching. Eveer sensitive to the mingled strands of language and feeling that constitute both artistic creativity and our response to it, Braudy places each suject in its own time and place, as well as orienting it to current responses. The works presented here, reviess, articles, academic essays, and lectdures, were written for a variety of audiences: Specialists in 18th century English literature, high school and college teachers interested in the study of English, film buffs, film historians, and the fabled general reader. Contents in Six Part: Principles, Authors and Audiences, Body and Text, Fictions of Feeling, the Sway of Genre, and Myths of History.