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Shadow of a Doubt

Online ISBN:
9781800852402
Print ISBN:
9781800859302
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

Shadow of a Doubt

Published online:
20 January 2022
Published in print:
1 June 2021
Online ISBN:
9781800852402
Print ISBN:
9781800859302
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow of a Doubt even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship.  Analyzing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship and social history, knowledge and epistemology, homesickness and “family values,” it shows how impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content.  In a related way it illustrates how the film’s terrors have to do with the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles.  Finally it understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centered Hitchcock text and a milestone film not only because it marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life but because it opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.

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