Features a collection of essays examining the film "The Piano" from a range of differing perspectives. This work encapsulates the vision of the film through diverse approaches - auteurist, feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial, melodrama and romance - as a major cinematic achievement and as a complex and intriguing cultural product.

Interesting and authoritative analyses of the film's textual narrative and representational strategies produce an informative rationale.

Part 1 GENDER, PSYCHOANALYSIS, MELODRAMA
1 Performing The Piano, by Ruth Barcan and Madeleine Fogarty
2 With Choices Like These, Who Needs Enemies?: The Piano, Women's Articulations, Melodrama, and the Woman's Film, by Neil Robinson
3 Female Sexuality, Creativity, and Desire in The Piano, by Richard Allen
4 The Sickness Unto Death: Dislocated Gothic in a Minor Key, by Kirsten Moana Thompson
Part 2 CULTURAL STUDIES
5 In the body of The Piano, by Felicity Coombs
6 Tempestuous petticoats: Costume and desire in The Piano, by Stella Bruzzi
Part 3 POST COLONIAL STUDIES AND ISSUES OF NATION
7 The Return of the Repressed?: Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano, by Lynda Dyson
8 From Land Escape to Bodyscape: Images of the Land in The Piano, by Laurence Simmons
9 A Land Without a Past: Dreamtime and Nation in The Piano, by Anna Neill
10 Birth of a Nation?: From Utu to The Piano, by Bridget Orr
Part 4 DIARY
11 Cutting it Fine: Notes on The Piano in the Editing Room, by Claire Corbett