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Dear MECCSA Subscribers, A new publication from Indiana University Press Free postage to UK customers http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/descended-from-hercules Descended from Hercules Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen Robert A. Rushing "A pleasure to read, cover to cover. This book is smartly conceived, and written with elegant and persuasive prose." — David A. Gerstner, author of Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic Muscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.Using techniques like slow motion and stopped time, these films instill the hero’s vitality with timeless admiration and immerse the hero’s body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but without sexual desire. These"sword and sandal" films represent a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention that offers the spectator an imagined form of the male body—one free of illness, degeneracy, and the burdens of poverty—that defends goodness with brute strength and perseverance, and serves as a model of ideal citizenry.Robert A. Rushing traces these epic heroes from Maciste in Cabiria in the early silent era to contemporary transnational figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, and to films such as Zach Snyder’s 300.Rushing explores how the very tactile modes of representation cement the genre’s ideological grip on the viewer. Robert A. Rushing is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds affiliate appointments in Media and Cinema Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is author of Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture and co-editor of Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s. Indiana University Press | New Directions in National Cinemas | October 2016 | 230pp | 20 b&w illus. | 9780253022509 | Paperback | £21.99* 20% discount with this code: CSL217DFHL** *Price subject to change. **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia. Author and independent bookshop blog - Bookscombined.com<https://bookscombined.com/> Follow us on Twitter @CAP_Ltd<http://twitter.com/#!/CAP_Ltd>, Facebook Combined Academic Publishers<https://business.facebook.com/Combined-Academic-Publishers-196269570500/?business_id=10155394879930501> and Sign up to our newsletter email alerts here<http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/content/34-subscribe-to-our-newsletter> -------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA mailing list -------------------------------------------------------- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the MECCSA list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MECCSA&A=1 ------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education. This mailing list is a free service and is not restricted to members. It is an unmoderated list and content reflect the views of those who post to the list and not of MeCCSA as an organisation. MeCCSA recommends that the list be used only for posting of information (for example about events, publications, conferences, lectures) of interest to members or to promote discussion of current issues of wide general interest in the field. Posts to the MeCCSA mailing list are public, indexed by Google, and can be accessed from the JISCMail website (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/meccsa.html). Any messages posted to the list are subject to the JISCMail acceptable use policy, which states that users should avoid engaging in unreasonable behaviour, or disrupting the general flow of discussion on a list. For further information, please visit: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/ --------------------------------------------------------