Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film

Idiot figures provide authors and filmmakers with a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion, and social identity; Halliwell (English and American studies, U. of Leicester) traces the concept of idiocy through the 19th and 20th centuries in the work of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Flannery O'Connor, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Lars Von Trier, and others. He focuses in particular on the ways that writers and filmmakers have been attracted by visual images of idiocy to stand in for ideas that can't be expressed through other means. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Martin Halliwell is Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Romantic Science and the Experience of Self (Ashgate 1999) and Modernism and Morality (Palgrave 2001) and is co-author of Critical Humanisms (Edinburgh University Press, 2003).