Cinematic Fictions
The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
The phrase “cinematic fiction” has been generally accepted in critical discourse, but usually only in the context of postwar novels. This volume examines the influence of film on the novel in early twentieth-century American literature. Drawing on everything from silent film to world cinema, novelists engaged in a kind of dialogue with the new medium, selectively pursuing strategies of montage, limited point of view, and scenic composition in their narratives. Offering new insights into classics such as The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, as well as discussing critical writings on film and active participation in filmmaking by major writers such as William Faulkner, Cinematic Fictions will be compulsory reading for scholars of American film and literature alike.
“Cinematic Fictions is superbly written throughout, and carries a distinct passion for its subject. This is an extremely valuable contribution to the scholarship of early twentieth-century American literature, early cinema, and American literary modernism.”
Introduction
1 Beginnings
2 Modernist Experiments: Gertrude Stein and Others
3 H.D. and the Limits of Vision
4 Ernest Hemingway: The Observer’s Visual Field
5 Success and Stardom in F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 William Faulkner: Perspective Experiments
7 John Dos Passos and the Art of Montage
8 Dreiser, Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair
9 Documentary of the 1930s
10 John Steinbeck: Extensions of Documentary
11 Taking Possession of the Images: African American Writers and the Cinema
12 Into the Night Life: Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin
13 Nathanael West and the Hollywood Novel
Bibliography
IndexLiterature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
