Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Filming an unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
- 2 The texts behind The Killers
- 3 The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975
- 4 Ship of Fools: from novel to film
- 5 Intruder in the Dust and the southern community
- 6 Dramatizing The Member of the Wedding
- 7 Film and narration: two versions of Lolita
- 8 World War II through the lens of Vietnam: adapting Slaughterhouse-Five to film
- 9 John Huston's Wise Blood
- 10 Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
- 11 Screening Raymond Carver: Robert Altman's Short Cuts
- 12 The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
- 13 The specter of history: filming memory in Beloved
- 14 Filming the spiritual landscape of James Jones's The Thin Red Line
- Filmography
- Index
- References
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Filming an unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
- 2 The texts behind The Killers
- 3 The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975
- 4 Ship of Fools: from novel to film
- 5 Intruder in the Dust and the southern community
- 6 Dramatizing The Member of the Wedding
- 7 Film and narration: two versions of Lolita
- 8 World War II through the lens of Vietnam: adapting Slaughterhouse-Five to film
- 9 John Huston's Wise Blood
- 10 Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
- 11 Screening Raymond Carver: Robert Altman's Short Cuts
- 12 The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
- 13 The specter of history: filming memory in Beloved
- 14 Filming the spiritual landscape of James Jones's The Thin Red Line
- Filmography
- Index
- References
Summary
Since the early days of the commercial cinema, many, perhaps most, important works of literary fiction have found a subsequent life on the screen, extending their reach and influence. Filmmakers, in turn, have enjoyed the economic and critical benefits of recycling what the industry knows as “pre-sold properties.” No doubt, this complex intersection has deeply marked both arts. Keith Cohen, for example, has persuasively argued that cinematic narrative exerted a decisive influence on the shift in novelistic aesthetics from “telling” to “showing,” providing new depth of meaning to the old maxim ut pictura poiesis. Film theorists, in turn, most notably Sergei Eisenstein, have emphasized the formative influence on cinematic storytelling of the classic realist novel, whose techniques and themes, adapted by D. W. Griffith and others, made possible a filmic art of extended narrative. Modern fictional form has been shaped by filmic elements such as montage, shifting point of view, and close attention to visual texture. An enabling condition of this constant and mutually fruitful exchange has been the unconventional conventionality of both art forms, their generic receptivity to outside influence. As Robert Stam puts it, “both the novel and the fiction film are summas by their very nature. Their essence is to have no essence, to be open to all cultural forms.”
Screen adaptations provide ideal critical sites not only for examining in detail how literary fiction is accommodated to cinematic form, but also for tracing the history of the symbiotic relationship of the two arts and the multifarious and ever-shifting connections between the commercial institutions responsible for their production.
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- Information
- Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen , pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007