Federico Fellini remains the best known of the postwar Italian directors. This collection of essays brings Fellini criticism up to date, employing a range of recent critical filters, including semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist and deconstructionist. Accordingly, a number of important themes arise - the reception of fascism, the crisis of the subject, the question of agency, homo-eroticism, feminism, and constructions of gender. Since the early 1970s, a slide in critical and theoretical attention to Fellini`s work has corresponded with an assumption that his films are self-indulgent and lacking in political value. This volume moves the discussion towards a politics of signification, contending that Fellini`s evolving self-reflexivity is not mere solipsism but rather a critique of both aesthetics and signification. The essays presented here are almost all new - the two exceptions being important signifiers in Fellini studies. The first, Frank Burke`s "Federico Fellini: Reality/Representation/Signification" laid the foundation in the late 1980s for considering Fellini`s work in the light of postmodernism. The second, Marguerite Waller`s "Whose Dolce Vita is this Anyway?: The Language of Fellini`s Cinema" (1990), provides a contemporary re-reading of Fellini`s most successful film. This lively and ambitious collection brings a new critical language to bear on Fellini`s films, offering fresh insights into their underlying issues and meaning. In bringing Fellini criticism up to date, it will have a significant impact on film studies, reclaiming this important director for a contemporary audience.