Paula Marantz Cohen

"A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year" Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English and Dean of the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. Her books include Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us about Empathy; Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism; Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth; and the bestselling novel Jane Austen in Boca. An invigorating exploration of the pleasures and social benefits...

"A marvelously rich and intelligent read, atmospheric, witty, irreverent, and not least a sharply perceptive portrait of those three extraordinary Jameses."

—John Banville, author of The Infinities

Under Certain Circumstances, No One Is More Suited to Solving a Crime than a Woman Confined to Her Bed

An invalid for most her life, Alice James is quite used to people underestimating her. And she generally doesn't

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While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.0Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous...

In Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, Paula Marantz Cohen tells the story of silent film's rise. American silent film, she contends, answered the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson and Thoreau for an original mode of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. Tracing silent film's roots in popular nineteenth-century forms such as vaudeville, landscape painting, and portrait photography, Cohen documents...