Reflecting on our voyeuristic behavior as readers and moviegoers, this literary study highlights the contrast between the ethical rules of real life and the rules of fiction and film, which
allow for nonreciprocal relationships between the reader/viewer and the characters/narrator. The book supplies fresh readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Charles Dickens’s The
Adventures of Oliver Twist, Herman Melville’s Typee, and Henry James’s “In the Cage.” The films analyzed are Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Conversation. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
