Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel Up to World War II - Hardcover

David Seed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846312124 ISBN 13: 9781846312120

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2009

Synopsis

This title provides new insights into American cinematic classics. It sheds new light onto some lesser known figures such as Karl Van Vechten and Tom Kromer. This is an essential resource for scholars and students of the twentieth century American novel and film. The phrase cinematic fiction has now been generally accepted into critical discourse, but is usually applied to post-war novels. This book asks a simple question: given their fascination with the new medium of film, did American novelists attempt to apply cinematic methods in their own writings? From its very beginnings the cinema has played a special role in defining American culture. Covering the period from the 1910s up to the Second World War, Cinematic Fictions; offers new insights into classics like The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath discussing major writers' critical writings on film and active participation in film-making. Cinematic Fictions is also careful not to portray 'cinema' as a single or stable entity. Some novelists drew on silent film; others looked to the Russian theorists for inspiration; and, yet others turned to continental film-makers rather than to Hollywood. Film itself was constantly evolving during the first decades of the twentieth century and the writers discussed here engaged in a kind of dialogue with the new medium, selectively pursuing strategies of montage, limited point of view and scenic composition towards their different ends. Contrasting a diverse range of cinematic and literary movements, this will be compulsory reading for scholars of American literature and film.

About this title

Review:

Cinematic Fictions is often fascinating. Seed makes reference to an impressive range of texts in comparison and counterpoint to those around the key fictions around which each chapter's discussion revolves. This will make this particular study attractive to teachers of early twentieth-century American literature, as well as of American Studies more broadly, of modules that focus on modernity and on visual and film cultures.' --Professor Sharon Monteith, University of Nottingham

About the Author:

David Seed is Professor of American Literature at the University of Liverpool and the author of monographs on US novelists Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller and Rudolph Wurlitzer. Currently editing the Blackwell's Companion to Twentieth Century U.S. Fiction he has also published a number of critical works on Science Fiction and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of American Studies and of the board of consulting editors of Science Fiction Studies.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1846312124
• ISBN 13: 9781846312120
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288