The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism

This book examines early film and film culture in the UK as a substantial context for the emergence of modernism in literature, considering authors including Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. The notion of a special relationship between cinema and modernism is one of the oldest components of modernist historiography, but only with the recent renaissance in the study of early cinema in the UK has film history developed a detailed enough picture for cinema to be fully examined as a major historical context for literary practice. Charting the characteristics of the new institution "the cinema," and linking them to literary modernism'¬"s distinguishing features, this study will provide students and scholars with the first account of cinema as a cause for modernism. Shail draws on research into little-known sources to treat cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, providing a comprehensive account of how modernism originated as a consequence of '¬ ; rather than a conscious aesthetic response to '¬ ; the emergence of cinema. The book treats literary modernism not as an echo of cinema but as a consequence of cinema'¬"s new accounts of language, time, collectivity, and the self, and considers the founding of a system of celebrity, the rise of a habitual popular audience, and the first institutionalized forms of popular film discourse.