The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism [Paperback]

Modernist writing has always been linked with cinema. The recent renaissance in early British film studies has allowed cinema to emerge as a major historical context for literary practice. Treating cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, this book analyzes the role of early British film culture in literature, thus providing the first account of cinema as a cause for modernism.

Shails study draws on little-known sources to create a detailed picture of cinema following its second birth as both institution and medium. The book presents a comprehensive account of how UK-based modernism originated as a consequence ofrather than a conscious aesthetic response tothis new component of the cultural landscape. Films new accounts of language, endeavor, time, collectivity and political change are first considered, then related to the patterns that comprised modernist texts. Authors discussed include Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.

Introduction: From The Cinematograph To The Pictures 1: The Cinema of Narrative Integration, The End of Impressionism, and the Rise of Modernism 2: Cinemas Continuous Present and Modernist Temporality 3: Mass Consciousness and Mass Cinema 4: The Picture Personality and The Modernist Turn to Epic Afterword: A Picture Feverishly Turned

Andrew Shail is Lecturer in Film in the Department of English at Newcastle University, UK.