"This book explores the relationship between creative production and male imagination of the female body through a unique summoning of three distinct disciplines around the notion of the cut. It places the complex desire to cut the woman's body at the center of an investigation of male identity in Western culture through incisive discussions of poetry, cinema, and psychoanalysis.

The terms of the inquiry disclose an uncanny male disposition to femininity and motherhood, and its direct implication in productive acts of cutting.

Using the works of Charles Baudelaire, Francois Truffaut, and Sigmund Freud as models, the author establishes how these figures shaped and perpetuated a cultural understanding of women that they continued to represent in late romantic images, despite their respective innovative talents and influences in bringing about decisive cultural moments such as Modernism, New Wave cinema, and psychoanalysis.".

"The cross-disciplinary nature of this book will attract a large readership: it will be of direct interest to literary scholars in and beyond French studies and will also appeal to film specialists, feminist theorists, and experts in psychoanalytical theory."--BOOK JACKET.