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Sadoff, Dianne F.

Sadoff, Dianne F.

Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen

How British fiction on film arouses and allays contemporary fears about society

Ranging from cinematic images of Jane Austen’s estates to Oscar Wilde’s drawing rooms, Dianne F. Sadoff looks at popular heritage films, often featuring Hollywood stars, that have been adapted from nineteenth-century novels.

Victorian Vogue argues that heritage films perform different cultural functions at key historical moments in the twentieth century. According to Sadoff, they are characterized by a double historical consciousness—one that is as attentive to the concerns of the time of production as to those of the Victorian period. If James Whale’s Frankenstein and Tod Browning’s Dracula exploited post-Depression fear in the 1930s, the horror films of the 1950s used the genre to explore homosexual panic, 1970s movies elaborated the sexuality only hinted at in the thirties, and films of the 1990s indulged the pleasures of consumption.

Taking a broad view of the relationships among film, literature, and current events, Sadoff contrasts films not merely with their nineteenth-century source novels but with crucial historical moments in the twentieth century, showing their cultural use in interpreting the present, not just the past.


"Dianne F. Sadoff's book promises to be the definitive work on film adaptations of nineteenth-century fiction. It is wide-ranging and strikingly intelligent, has an important thesis, and best of all, is fun to read."
—Jay Clayton, author of Charles Dickens in Cyberspace

"Sadoff clearly has her chops in literature, film and postmodern theory."
—Times Higher Education

Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century

A foundational look at contemporary uses of the Victorian and the presence of the past in postmodern culture.  Celebrated films by Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, and Ang Lee; best-selling novels by A. S. Byatt and William Gibson; revivals of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll's Alice, and nostalgic photography; computer graphics and cyberpunk performances: contemporary culture, high and low, has fallen in love with the nineteenth century. Major critical thinkers have also found in the period the origins of contemporary consumerism, sexual science, gay culture, and feminism. And postmodern theory, which once drove a wedge between contemporary interpretation and its historical objects, has lately displayed a new self-consciousness about its own appropriations of the past. This diverse collection of essays begins a long-overdue discussion of how postmodernism understands the Victorian as its historical predecessor.

Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis

Deploying Latour's model of scientific theory production, this book argues that the historical emergence of psychoanalysis depended on nineteenth-century scientific practices: laboratory experimentation, medical transmission of research findings along collegial or social networks, and medical representation of illness, including case studies, amphitheatrical demonstration of cases, hospital records of symptoms, and laboratory graphology and photography of patients. Freud used autobiography, summary, and outline to stabilize his concepts and control the dissemination of his new science. Psychoanalysis had successfully created new scientific "plausible bridges" between psyche and soma, nature and the social, to produce a modern theory of hybrid subjectivity that was rooted in, yet conceptually separated from, the body.

Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates, co-edited with William E. Cain

Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates shows readers how theory can, in the words of William E. Cain, enable teachers and students "to illuminate anew the structure of texts, to write literary and cultural history with greater richness and depth, and to understand social and institutional relations more intricately."

In twenty-one refreshingly readable essays, contributors discuss their techniques for introducing theory to students in classes on a range of levels. They describe how they overcame initial apprehensions about teaching theory to undergraduates and enumerate the ways that theory enriched both their and their students' experiences. The theoretical methodologies covered include feminism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, African American criticism, new historicism, cultural studies, and film theory.

Intended for teachers who already use theory in their courses as well as for those who are teaching theory for the first time, the volume offers history, analysis, and practical advice. 

Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood

Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982

Review essay of Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot, and Brontë on Fatherhood by John Kucich (Nineteenth-Century Fiction