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Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion discovers the considerable impact of motion pictures on literary culture across the early decades of the twentieth century by exploring how motion pictures spurred change in twentieth century literature.
List of contents
- Introduction: Literature in Motion
- Chapter 1. Starring the Author: Literary Celebrity and Popular Authorship
- Chapter 2. Black Authorship at the Movies: Oscar Micheaux, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Wallace Thurman
- Chapter 3. Novel Forms: Rose Atwood's "A Man's Duty," Oscar Micheaux's The Masquerade: An Historical Novel, Willa Cather's A Lost Lady
- Chapter 4. Readerly Pleasures: Screen Reading, and The Motion Picture Story Magazine
- Afterword. Roaming with Vachel Lindsay and Oscar Micheaux
- Works Cited
- Notes
About the author
Sarah Gleeson-White is Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on early twentieth-century U.S. literature and film in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, African American Review and elsewhere. Her books include William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: The Annotated Screenplays, Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, and, as co-editor, The New William Faulkner Studies.
Summary
Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture: Literature in Motion argues that the emergence of motion pictures constituted a defining moment in U.S. literary history. Author Sarah Gleeson-White discovers what happened to literary culture-both popular and higher-brow—when inserted into the spectacular world of motion pictures during the early decades of the twentieth century. How did literary culture respond to, and how was it altered by, the development of motion pictures, literature's exemplar and rival in narrative realism and enthrallment? Gleeson-White draws on extensive archival film and literary materials, and unearths a range of collaborative, cross-media expressive and industrial practices to reveal the manifold ways in which early-twentieth-century literary culture sought both to harness and temper the reach of motion pictures.
Additional text
Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture is striking for its ambitions and its generosity. In it, Sarah Gleeson-White defines a pervasive and significant phenomenon that has been heretofore ignored: her term 'motion-picture print culture' so perfectly defines the proliferation of film-engaged texts and texts on film that it will surely become part of the lexicon for describing the period's cultural exchanges. Beginning by identifying film's effects on authorship and ending with an analysis of how readers, too, were changed by 'motion-picture print culture,' this book is a model for reading new cultural forms, from the author cameo to the storyization.
