March eBook of the Month Examines the History of "Badness" in Film
Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen available March 1-31 through more than 13,000 participating libraries.

BOULDER, COLO.— How can bad be so good? From Nosferatu to Tom Ripley, from evil villains to empires of evil, from psychotic slashers to bloodthirsty aliens, violence, infamy, and slime has become an expected staple of the Hollywood diet. Yet, even from cinema's earliest days, the public has been delighted to be stunned by screen representations of negativity in all its forms—monstrosity, corruption, ugliness, villainy, darkness, and evil incarnate.

In the March eBook of the Month, the contributors to Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, explore the long line of thieves, rapists, varmints, codgers, dodgers, manipulators, exploiters, conmen, killers, vamps, liars, demons, cold-blooded megalomaniacs, and warmhearted flakes that populate cinematic narrative.

While it is convenient to draw conclusions that headlines and popular rhetoric have influenced the portrayal of evil in film, Bad is careful not to attribute badness to any single source. Instead, contributors consider a wide range of genres and use a variety of critical approaches to examine evil, villainy, and immorality in twentieth-century film.

Edited by Murray Pomerance, Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University, Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen is published by SUNY Press and includes contributions from: Aaron Baker, Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Alexander Doty, Kirby Farrell, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Lester D. Friedman, Cynthia Fuchs, Henry A. Giroux, Tom Gunning, Ina Rae Hark, Kristen Hatch, Patricia Clare Ingham, E. Ann Kaplan, Peter Lehman, Gina Marchetti, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, William Rothman, Christopher Sharrett, Tony Williams, and Steven Woodward.

To help libraries promote the March eBook of the Month, NetLibrary has developed a tool kit of free promotional resources that includes print-on-demand bookmarks, a sample press release, and electronic support materials. More information is available at:

http://library.netlibrary.com/eBookOfTheMonth.aspx

Praise for Bad

"Pomerance concludes that these screen evils heighten 'individuality and personal sanctimony at the expense of group relations Badness on film may be a repository of important secrets.' The contributors, established academics all, deliver uniformly original, insightful, provocative, and clear analysis."
— CHOICE

"A varied and stimulating collection, informative over a broad range of critical, historical, and theoretical issues, and very entertaining to boot. One of its most laudable characteristics is its willingness to take on fresh and under explored topics. It should find eager readers among both film scholars and movie buffs."
— David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible

"What is most intellectually engaging for me is the book's savvy reluctance to attribute 'badness' to any single phenomenon, source, cause, or field of inquiry—for example, malevolence is a matter of ideology, but it is also always 'something else.' The book is rich and complex while remaining accessible to a variety of audiences, and it will make a valuable addition to the field of cinema studies."
— Michael DeAngelis, author of Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves

About the Author

Murray Pomerance is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the editor of Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, also published by SUNY Press, and Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film.

About SUNY Press

Celebrating forty years of publishing in 2006, SUNY Press publishes scholarly and trade books in support of the State University of New York's commitments to teaching, research, and public service. With an editorial board made up of SUNY faculty from throughout the state, SUNY Press has a large catalog, featuring authors from around the world. From a modest beginning in 1966, SUNY Press has become one of the largest public university presses in the United States, with an annual output of around 200 books and a backlist of more than 3400 titles. The Press publishes chiefly in the humanities and social sciences, and has attained national recognition in the areas of education, philosophy, religion, Jewish studies, Asian studies, political science, and sociology, with increasing growth in the areas of literature, film studies, communication, women's studies, and environmental studies.

About NetLibrary

Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, NetLibrary (www.netlibrary.org) is a division of Online Computer Library Center, Inc., a worldwide library cooperative. NetLibrary provides content and technical delivery solutions to institutional libraries, corporations and government agencies that facilitate the purchase, management and distribution of research, reference, digital learning, and general interest content via Web-based technologies. NetLibrary's eContent solution is the most broadly adopted in the market, making the content of more than 400 publishers and eContent providers available through more than 13,000 libraries worldwide.