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This book tells the story of a generation of writers who were passionately engaged with politics and with cinema, exploring the rise and fall of a distinct tradition of cinematic literature. Dismayed by the rise of fascism in Europe and by the widening gulf separating the classes at home, these writers turned to cinema as a popular and hard-hitting art form. The book crosses boundaries between high modernism and social realism and between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, bringing together Virginia Woolf with W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen with John Sommerfield, Sergei Eisenstein with Gracie Fields, and offering new interpretations of their texts. The book ends in the Second World War, an era when the bombs and searchlights rendered everyday life cinematic. The book interrogates the genres she maps, drawing on cultural theories from the 1920s onwards to investigate the nature of the cinematic and the literary. While it was not possible directly to transfer the techniques of the screen to the page any more than it was possible to ‘go over’ to the working classes, the attempts nonetheless reveal a fascinating intersection of the visual and the verbal, the political and the aesthetic. In reading between the frames of an unexplored literary tradition, this book redefines the 1930s and wartime literature and politics, offering a new perspective on Spanish Civil War as well as Second World War writing.

This book examines how the productive interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind. Reading between these parallel histories of mind and media reveals a dynamic conceptual, aesthetic and technological engagement with the moving image that, in turn, produces a new understanding of the production and circulation of the work of key nineteenth-century writers, such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray. As Helen Groth shows, this engagement is both typically of the nineteenth-century in its preoccupation with questions of automatism and volition (unconscious and conscious thought), spirit and materiality, art and machine, but also definitively modern in its secular articulation of the instructive and entertaining applications of making images move both inside and outside the mind.

This study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, ‘the speech-gesture complex’, Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema. The book provides new close readings of major and neglected modernist work, alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory. It establishes a new critical-theoretical category, places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo.