Mae West by Jill Watts

Mae West by Jill Watts

"Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humour. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of film legend? Sifting through previously untapped sources, this work unravels the enigmatic life of Mae West, tracing her early years spent in the Brooklyn subculture of boxers and underworld figures, and follows her journey through burlesque, vaudeville, Broadway and, finally, to Hollywood, where she quickly became one of the big screen's most popular and colourful stars. Exploring West's penchant for contradiction and her carefully perpetuated paradoxes, Watts convincingly argues that Mae West borrowed heavily from African American culture, music, dance and humour, creating a subversive voice for herself by which she artfully challenged society and its assumptions regarding race, class and gender.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780195105476
ISBN 10	0195105478
Title	Mae West
Author	Jill Watts
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2001-08-23
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable