Description
According to prevailing media histories, film long ago ought to have rendered the novel obsolete. The irony of this story is that the "death of the novel" at the hands of film has for a long time now been a pervasive trope of the novel's continued reinvention. The Novel After Film offers a substantial reassessment of this paradoxical new condition of novelistic practice in which writers have re-imagined the novel in the shadow of film. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamor of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. How did the cinema-with its crude continuities, crowded theaters, stock plots, and ghostly images-seem to flout conventional ideas of narrative form? What new literacies of experience and representation did film seem to promise? As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel's respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement, authors such as Virginia Woolf, H. D., Henry Green and Aldous Huxley turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism's atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film's bad form took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in helping writers negotiate a transforming public culture which seemed to be leaving the novel behind.
About the Author
Jonathan Foltz is Assistant Professor of Film and Literature at Boston University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Screen, Critical Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Reviews
The Novel after Filmis an impressive critical work that goes beyond a limited study of the relationship between cinema and literature, offering a wealth of additional materials to engage with. * Dr Teodora Domotor, The British Society for Literature and Science *
Foltz's thorough and provocative analysis lays the groundwork for future investigations of the relationship between narrative film - and other forms of visual media - and the novel. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190676490
Author Jonathan Foltz
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 582g
Dimensions(mm) 237mm * 164mm * 23mm
About the Author
Jonathan Foltz is Assistant Professor of Film and Literature at Boston University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Screen, Critical Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Reviews
The Novel after Filmis an impressive critical work that goes beyond a limited study of the relationship between cinema and literature, offering a wealth of additional materials to engage with. * Dr Teodora Domotor, The British Society for Literature and Science *
Foltz's thorough and provocative analysis lays the groundwork for future investigations of the relationship between narrative film - and other forms of visual media - and the novel. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190676490
Author Jonathan Foltz
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 582g
Dimensions(mm) 237mm * 164mm * 23mm
