Are You Not Entertained?

Lindsay Steenberg is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she co-ordinates their graduate programme in Popular Cinema. She has published numerous articles on violence and gender in postmodern and postfeminist media culture. She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science.

• List of Figures, Tables and IllustrationsDedicationAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Millennial Masculinity and the Gladiators of Y2k - “Are You Not Entertained?”1. A Gladiatorial Genealogy: “My Name Is Gladiator”2. Genre Play: “Playthings of the Crowd”3. The Arena Fight: “Two Men Enter. One Man Leaves”4. Nostalgia: “Is Rome Worth One Good Man’s Life?”5. The Gladiatorial Burlesque: “Do You Like Movies About Gladiators?”6. Celebrity: “Win the Crowd”Conclusion: We Were EntertainedBibliographyFilmographyAppendix: Arena Fight Analysis

Steenberg moves deftly across time, space, media and story type, interrogating the gladiator as a powerful archetype of joyous nostalgic violence. This definitive study maps cinema, genre histories and masculinity in new and thought-provoking ways: a truly spectacular achievement.