Ebook: The Men Who Knew Too Much Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Cover; Contents; Preface; Reading James with Hitchcock, Seeing Hitchcock through James; 1. National Bodies; 2. Secrets, Lies, and "Virtuous Attachments": The Ambassadors and The 39 Steps; 3. Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock after the American Century: Circulation and Nonreturn in The American Scene and Strangers on a Train; 4. Colonial Discourse and the Unheard Other in Washington Square and The Man Who Knew Too Much; 5. Bump: Concussive Knowledge in James and Hitchcock; 6. James's Birdcage/Hitchcock's Birds; 7. Sounds of Silence in The Wings of the Dove and Blackmail; 8. The Perfect Enigma.;Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock knew too much. Self-imposed exiles fully in the know, they approached American and European society as inside-outsiders, a position that afforded them a kind of double vision. Masters of their arts, manipulators of their audiences, prescient and pathbreaking in their techniques, these demanding and meticulous artists fiercely defended authorial and directorial control. Their fictions and films are obsessed with knowledge and its powers: who knows what? What is there to know? The Men Who Knew Too Much innovatively pairs these two greats, showing them to be at on.