Dear Screen-L: The University of California Press is pleased to announce the publication of: The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s Lea Jacobs is Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of _The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1929-1942 (_UC Press) and _Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film._ http://go.ucpress.edu/Jacobs "Lea Jacobs's groundbreaking book examines the crucial films, both well-known and until now obscure, that marked a decisive shift in 1920s American cinematic sensibility and taste-from 'hokum' to 'sophistication,' a change that would inflect future Hollywood filmmaking. All serious scholars of American film history will read this book with admiration and find its insights as well as its methods an inspiration."-Matthew Bernstein, author of _Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent_ _The Decline of Sentiment _seeks to characterize the radical shifts in taste that transformed American film in the jazz age. Based upon extensive reading of trade papers and the popular press of the day, Lea Jacobs documents the films and film genres that were considered old-fashioned, as well as those dubbed innovative and up-to-date, and looks closely at the works of filmmakers such as Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Monta Bell, among many others. Her analysis-focusing on the influence of literary naturalism on the cinema, the emergence of sophisticated comedy, and the progressive alteration of the male adventure story and the seduction plot-is a comprehensive account of the modernization of classical Hollywood film style and narrative form. Full information about the book, including the table of contents, is available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/Jacobs -- Lolita Guevarra Electronic Marketing Coordinator University of California Press Tel. 510.643.4738 | Fax 510.643.7127 [log in to unmask] ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org