Reading the Cinematograph
The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896-1912
Distributed for University of Exeter Press
Reading the Cinematograph pairs eight short stories about the cinema—including works by such notables as Rudyard Kipling and Sax Rohmer—with eight new essays from leading film and literary scholars like Tom Gunning and Andrew Higson to reveal the influence that film and fiction had on one another in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Reading the Cinematograph: Introduction
Andrew Shail
Story 1: Our Detective Story
Dagonet [George R. Sims]
Chapter 1: George R. Sims and the Film as Evidence
Stephen Bottomore
Story 2: The Awful Story of Heley Croft
A. S. Appelbee
Chapter 2: Cinema Re-Mystified: A. S. Appelbee’s Technological Ghost Story
David Trotter and Chris O’Rourke
Story 3: Colonel Rankin’s Advertisement
Raymond Rayne
Chapter 3: The Great American Kinetograph: News, Fakery and the Boer War
Andrew Shail
Story 4: Mrs. Bathurst
Rudyard Kipling
Chapter 4: ‘The Very Thing’: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mrs Bathurst’
Tom Gunning
Story 5: The Green Spider
A[rthur Henry] Sarsfield Ward, a.k.a. Sax Rohmer
Chapter 5: ‘Only from the Senses’: Detection, Early Cinema and a Giant Green Spider
Stacy Gillis
Story 6: Romantic Lucy
Alphonse Courlander
Chapter 6: ‘She Had So Many Appearances’: Alphonse Courlander and the Birth of the ‘Moving Picture Girl’
Jon Burrows
Story 7: Love and the Bioscope: A Heart-Thrilling Story of a Deserted Bride
Mrs H. J. Bickle
Chapter 7: Melodrama, Sensation and the Discourse of Modernity in ‘Love and the Bioscope’
Lise Shapiro Sanders
Story 8: The Sense of Touch
Ole Luk-Oie
Chapter 8: A visit to the cinema in 1912: ‘The Sense of Touch’
Andrew Higson
Notes
Index
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