Bluebeard's Legacy

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife,_x000D_a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers,_x000D_artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to_x000D_disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal._x000D__x000D_This transdisciplinary work identifies the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for_x000D_twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is on how the modernist imagination used_x000D_the elements of Bluebeard's tale to explore masculinity's anxieties in the face of the_x000D_emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality, as well as_x000D_anxieties of ethnic and cultural difference. It also examines fundamental disquiet_x000D_about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine._x000D__x000D_With chapters by Maria Tatar, Elisabeth Bronfen, Mererid Puw Davies, Ian Christie,_x000D_David Cooper, Michael Hiltbrunner and the editors, the volume undertakes cultural,_x000D_contextual and musicological analyses of Bartk's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle,_x000D_tracing Bluebeard's evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the_x000D_cinematic hommes fatals of Mlis, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock. The result is an_x000D_intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death._x000D_