Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Bentley, Nancy

doi:10.1002/9781444343809.ch12

Cited by 9 publications

References 4 publications

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Silent Film and the Formations of U.S. Literary Culture

Gleeson-White

2024

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Silent Film and the Formations of US Literary Culture: Literature in Motion argues that the emergence and development of motion pictures across the silent-film era constituted a defining moment in US literary history, one that would alter literature’s institutions and practices in fundamental and far-reaching ways. As literary historians have ably demonstrated, late nineteenth-century advances in transport, communications, and printing technologies combined to alter radically literary culture, not least of all in terms of its massification; as Henry James declared in 1899, “The book . . . is almost everywhere.” However, less is known about the considerable role in these transformations in literary culture played by motion pictures—literature’s rival and exemplar in their claim to narrative realism and enthrallment. Silent Film and the Formations of US Literary Culture tells the story of what quickly became the inextricable entanglement of the literary and motion-picture industries. It asks, how exactly did literary culture respond to the emergence and development of narrative cinema? What were the material effects of motion pictures on it: its authors, publishers, readers, and manner of circulation? To answer these questions, it 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 to temper the reach of motion pictures.

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