By Jill Suzanne Smith

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2013. 237p

By John Belton

This book introduces the reader to basic issues related to the phenomenon of American Cinema. It looks at American Film Industry from the 1890s through th 1990s, but it does not always explore this history in a purely chronological way. In fact, it is not (strictly speaking) a history, which focusses more on topics and issues than on what happened when.

It begins with a profile of classical Hollywood cinema as a unique economic, industrial, aesthetic, and cultural institution. It considers the experience of moviegoing; the nature of Hollywood story-telling: and the roles played by the studio system, the star system, and film genres in the creation of a body of work that functions not only as entertainment but as a portrait of the relationship between an American national identity and an industrialized mass culture that has slowly evolved over the past century.

NY. McGraw Hill. 1994. 396p.

Edited by Gerardo Del Guercio

This collection offers six critical essays on the topic of psychology in Edgar Allan Poe. It came together as a response to a visible absence of this subject in recent scholarship. The volume presents Edgar Allan Poe as one of the pioneers in psychology, who often anticipated major theoretical trends and ideas in psychology in his incessant explorations of the relationship between behavior and the psyche. Scrutinizing serial killer narratives, obsessive narratives through Jungian unconscious, Lacanian Das Ding, doppelg angers, intersubjectivity, and the interrelationship between the material world and imaginative faculties, the essays reveal the richness and the complexity of Poe's work and its pertinence to contemporary culture.

 Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin,  2019. 168p.

By Samuel Butler.

Or Over The Range. This is a classic pioneering science fiction story written in 1872. A strange story where crime is treated as a sickness, and sickness as a crime.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. 1901. 140p.