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Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations Jim Ellis Table of Contents		$21.95 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5313-3 $66.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5312-6
A comprehensive look at the work of Britain’s most controversial director Best known as an iconoclastic, wildly inventive filmmaker, Derek Jarman was also an accomplished author, painter, and landscape artist. In Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, Jim Ellis considers Jarman’s wide-ranging oeuvre to present a broad perspective on the career and life of one of the most provocative, engaged, and important artists of the twentieth century. Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations analyzes Jarman’s work—including his famous films Caravaggio, Jubilee, Edward II, Blue, and Sebastiane—in relation to his critiques of the government and his activism in the gay community, from the liberationist movement to the AIDS epidemic. While others have frequently focused on Jarman’s biography, Ellis looks at how his politics and aesthetics are intertwined to comprehend his most radical aspects, particularly in films such as War Requiem and The Last of England. Here Jarman is revealed as an artist who keenly understood the role of history and mythology in creating a personal and national identity: as an activist, he sought to challenge old histories while producing new ones to carve out a space for alternative communities in Britain late in the twentieth century. Jim Ellis is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse. 312 pages | 29 b&w illustrations | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction:  Getting History Wrong 1. Artistic and Sexual Revolutions Situationism and Other Avant-gardes—The Gay Liberation Front 2.  Liberation, Space, and the Early Films Reconfiguring “Home” in the Super-8s—Gay Liberation Theology in Sebastiane 3. The Elizabethan Future Jubilee and the Punk Nation—Punk Heritage in The Tempest 4. The Caravaggio Years            Imagining Change: Imagining October—Homoerotic Countermythologies in The Angelic Conversation—Caravaggio: Gay History and the Scripts—Caravaggio and the Art of the Past 5.  Thatcherism, AIDS, and War The Last of England and the Landscape of Loss—War Requiem and the Army of Lovers 6. Time and the Garden The Garden at Prospect Cottage—Gardening History in Modern Nature—Histories of the Fall in The Garden 7. Blindness and Insight Edward II:  Queer Gothic—Wittgenstein and the Queer Life—Queer Vision in Blue   Coda: The Raft of the Medusa Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Select Filmography of Derek Jarman Index

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