From What's Up, Tiger Lily? to Match Point, Woody Allen's work has generated substantial interest among scholars and professionals who have written extensively about the director. In The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, Charles L.P. Silet brings together two-dozen scholarly articles that address the core of Allen's work from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives.

From What's Up, Tiger Lily? to Match Point, Woody Allen's work has generated substantial interest among scholars and professionals who have written extensively about the director. In The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, Charles L.P. Silet brings together two-dozen scholarly articles that address the core of Allen's work from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives. With a special emphasis on his films of the 1980s, this collection includes both general essays that examine various themes and issues encompassed in Allen's repertoire, as well as discussions that focus on one or two specific films. General essays explore Allen's Jewish background as a religious and cultural facet, his apparent love affair with New York City, and his relation to various strains of humor_particularly American film humor, but also Allen's broad use of such traditional comic tropes as irony and parody. The essays on individual films include examinations of some of Allen's most significant work including Love and Death, Annie Hall, Interiors, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Shadows and Fog. A number of the articles collected here were originally published in now hard to locate places, while others were selected from journals not usually associated with film studies. The result is an anthology of essays that presents an overview of the central issues raised by Allen's body of work as well as a close examination of fourteen individual films that convey these larger themes. A wide-ranging exploration of one of America's most innovative and productive modern directors, this book should appeal to both professionals and students of contemporary film comedy.

Part 1 Acknowledgments
Part 2 Introduction
Part 3 Chronology
Part 4 Part 1: General Essays
Chapter 5 1. Woody Allen's Lovable Anxious Schlemiels
Chapter 6 2. Woody Allen's New York
Chapter 7 3. The Narrator and the Narrative: The Evolution of Woody Allen's Film Comedies
Chapter 8 4. Woody Allen's Theological Imagination
Chapter 9 5. Woody Allen's Comic Irony
Chapter 10 6. Self-Deprecation and the Jewish Humor of Woody Allen
Chapter 11 7. Beyond Parody: Woody Allen in the 1980s
Part 12 Part 2: Individual Films
Chapter 13 8. Woody Allen and Fantasy:Play It Again, Sam
Chapter 14 9.Love and Death and Food: Woody Allen's Comic Use of Gastronomy
Chapter 15 10. Powerful Man Gets Pretty Woman: Style Switching inAnnie Hall
Chapter 16 11.Annie Hall and the Issue of Modernism
Chapter 17 12. AutumnInteriors, or the Ladies Eve: Woody Allen's Bergman Complex
Chapter 18 13. Woody Allen'sManhattan and the Ethicity of Narrative
Chapter 19 14.Ciao, Woody:Stardust Memories
Chapter 20 15. Painful Laughter: The Collapse of Humor in Woody Allen'sStardust Memories
Chapter 21 16. Mysterious Illnesses of Human Commodities in Woody Allen and Franz Kafka:Zelig
Chapter 22 17.Zelig and Contemporary Theory: Meditation on the Chameleon Text
Chapter 23 18. Woody's Mild Irish Rose:Broadway Danny Rose
Chapter 24 19.Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the Tradition of Metafiction
Chapter 25 20. Woody Allen'sInteriors: The Dark Side ofHannah and Her Sisters
Chapter 26 21. The Religion ofRadio Days
Chapter 27 22. Hlenka Regained: Irony and Ambiguity in the Narrator of Woody Allen'sAnother Woman
Chapter 28 23. Justice and the Withdrawal of God in Woody Allen'sCrimes and Misdemeanors
Chapter 29 24. Between Time and Eternity: Theological Notes onShadows and Fog
Part 30 Filmography
Part 31 Index
Part 32 About the Contributors
Part 33 About the Editor