Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures

Sarah McDonald · Susanna Scarparo

Mar 2009 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

Anything and everything may come under the rubric of violence in a society that is by and large addicted to the images of violence that are an inescapable part of contemporary reality. In the wake of recent international events, many have come to accept the perpetration of violence as morally acceptable and a just enterprise towards peace. But what is violence? How do we identify something or somebody as violent? Is violence justifiable? If so, under what circumstances? Violent Depictions addresses these and other questions on the role and nature of violence in a range of different national and historical contexts.

Violent Depictions is a reflection on the relationship between violence and representation and includes a number of thematic categories such as youth violence in films, violence against women in literary and cinematic texts, gendered representations of terrorism, the violence of colonial encounters and of the remembering of institutionalised violence.

About the author

Susanna Scarparo is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University. Her publications include Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction (Troubador 2005) and numerous articles on life writing, feminist theory, Italian Australian literature and contemporary Italian women writers. She is also the co-editor of Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women writing Lives (University of Delaware Press 2004).

Sarah McDonald is Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Monash University. She has published several articles on Brazilian cinema and is currently writing a book on gender and popular culture in Brazilian Cinema (forthcoming Tamesis).