H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies

H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies
Author: Keith Williams
Publisher: Liverpool Science Fiction Text
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781846310607

This book investigates Wells's interest in cinema and related media technologies, by placing it back into the contemporary cultural and scientific contexts giving rise to them. It plugs a gap in understanding Wells's contribution to exploring and advancing the possibilities of cinematic narrative and its social and ideological impacts in the modern period. Previous studies concentrate on adaptations: this book accounts for the specifically (proto)cinematic techniques and concerns of Wells's texts. It also focuses on contemporary film-making 'in dialogue' with his ideas. Alongside Hollywood's later transactions, it gives equal weight to neglected British and continental European dimensions. Chapter 1 shows how early writings (The Time Machine and short stories) feature many kinds of radically defamiliarised vision. These constitute imaginative speculations about the forms and potentials of moving image and electronic media. Chapter 2 discusses the power of voyeurism, 'absent presence' and the disjunction of sound-image reproduction implied in The Invisible Man and its topical politics, updated in notable screen versions. Chapter 3 extends this to dystopian warnings of systematic surveillance, broadcasting of celebrity personae and 'post-literate' video culture in When the Sleeper Wakes, a crucial template for urban futures on film. Chapter 4 analyses Wells's belated return to screenwriting in the 1930s. It accounts for his 'broadbrow' ambition of mediating between popular and avant-garde tendencies to promote his cause and its mixed results in Things to Come, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, etc. Chapter 5 finally surveys Wells's legacy on both small and large screens. It considers whether, as well as being raided for scenarios for spectacular effects, his subtexts still nourish an evolving tradition of alternative SF, which duly critiques the innovations and applications of its host media.

Maps of Utopia

Maps of Utopia
Author: Simon J. James
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-02-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191640018

H. G. Wells is one of the most widely-read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells's writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man's only alternative to self-destruction. Such a project differed radically from the aims of Wells's late-Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries - with consequences for the nature both of Wells's writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late-Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870-71 Education Acts. It considers Wells's best known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono-Bungay. It also examines less well-known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon and Wells's journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells's best-selling book in his own lifetime.

H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies

H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies
Author: Keith Williams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781846313257

This book investigates WellsOCOs interest in cinema and related media technologies, by placing it back into the contemporary cultural and scientific contexts giving rise to them. It plugs a gap in understanding WellsOCOs contribution to exploring and advancing the possibilities of cinematic narrative and its social and ideological impacts in the modern period. Previous studies concentrate on adaptations: this book accounts for the specifically (proto)cinematic techniques and concerns of WellsOCOs texts. It also focuses on contemporary film-making OCyin dialogueOCO with his ideas. Alongside HollywoodOCOs later transactions, it gives equal weight to neglected British and continental European dimensions. Chapter 1 shows how early writings ( The Time Machine and short stories) feature many kinds of radically defamiliarised vision. These constitute imaginative speculations about the forms and potentials of moving image and electronic media. Chapter 2 discusses the power of voyeurism, OCyabsent presenceOCO and the disjunction of sound-image reproduction implied in The Invisible Man and its topical politics, updated in notable screen versions. Chapter 3 extends this to dystopian warnings of systematic surveillance, broadcasting of celebrity personae and OCypost-literateOCO video culture in When the Sleeper Wakes, a crucial template for urban futures on film. Chapter 4 analyses WellsOCOs belated return to screenwriting in the 1930s. It accounts for his OCybroadbrowOCO ambition of mediating between popular and avant-garde tendencies to promote his cause and its mixed results in Things to Come, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, etc. Chapter 5 finally surveys WellsOCOs legacy on both small and large screens. It considers whether, as well as being raided for scenarios for spectacular effects, his subtexts still nourish an evolving tradition of alternative SF, which duly critiques the innovations and applications of its host media."

The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema

The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema
Author: Murray Leeder
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2017-01-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137583711

This study sees the nineteenth century supernatural as a significant context for cinema’s first years. The book takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a “ghostly,” “spectral” or “haunted” medium and asks what made such association possible. Examining the history of the projected image and supernatural displays, psychical research and telepathy, spirit photography and X-rays, the skeletons of the danse macabre and the ghostly spaces of the mind, it uncovers many lost and fascinating connections. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema locates film’s spectral affinities within a history stretching back to the beginning of screen practice and forward to the digital era. In addition to examining the use of supernatural themes by pioneering filmmakers like Georges Méliès and George Albert Smith, it also engages with the representations of cinema’s ghostly past in Guy Maddin’s recent online project Seances (2016). It is ideal for those interested in the history of cinema, the study of the supernatural and the pre-history of the horror film.

The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism

The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism
Author: Andrew Shail
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136455159

Modernist writing has always been linked with cinema. The recent renaissance in early British film studies has allowed cinema to emerge as a major historical context for literary practice. Treating cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, this book analyzes the role of early British film culture in literature, thus providing the first account of cinema as a cause for modernism. Shail’s study draws on little-known sources to create a detailed picture of cinema following its ‘second birth’ as both institution and medium. The book presents a comprehensive account of how UK-based modernism originated as a consequence of—rather than a conscious aesthetic response to—this new component of the cultural landscape. Film’s new accounts of language, endeavor, time, collectivity and political change are first considered, then related to the patterns that comprised modernist texts. Authors discussed include Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.

Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps

Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps
Author: J. P. Telotte
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0190949678

What impact did the new art of film have on the development of another new art, the emerging science fiction genre, during the pre- and early post-World War II era? Focusing on such popular pulp magazines as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories, this book traces this early relationship between film and literature through four common features: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editorial matters and readers' letters commenting on film; and the magazines' heralded cover and story illustrations. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early science fiction discourse, we can begin to see the key role that a cinematic mindedness played in this formative era and to expand the early history of science fiction as a cultural idea beyond the usual boundaries that have been staked out by its literary manifestations and the genre's historians.

Modernism and Time Machines

Modernism and Time Machines
Author: Tung Charles M. Tung
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre: American fiction
ISBN: 1474431364

Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarshipModernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.Key FeaturesDraws on insights from a range of sources, including critical geography, postcolonial theory, science and technology studies, and time studiesExamines different kinds of objects together: SF, Impressionism, and Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis; evolutionary biology, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Leinster's "e;Sidewise in Time"e;; Woolf, Philip K. Dick's alternate history, and the film Interstellar; bullet time, Faulkner's racialized lag, and Jessica Hagedorn's postcolonial anachronism; "e;big history,"e; Olaf Stapledon's two-billion-year novel of the human species, and Terrence Malick's film Tree of Life

The Novel After Film

The Novel After Film
Author: Jonathan Foltz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190676493

In this provocative and original study, Jonathan Foltz charts the institutional, stylistic and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century.

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds
Author: Peter J. Beck
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474229891

First published in 1897, H.G. Wells's alien invasion narrative The War of the Worlds was a landmark work of science fiction and one that continues to be adapted and referenced in the 21st century. Chronicling the novel's contexts, its origins and its many multi-media adaptations, this book is a complete biography of the life – and the afterlives – of The War of the Worlds. Exploring the original text's compelling sense of place and vivid recreation of Wells's Woking home and the concerns of fin-de-siécle Britain, the book goes on to chart the novel's immediate international impact. Starting with the initial serialisations in US newspapers, Peter Beck goes on to examine Orson Welles's legendary 1938 radio adaptation, TV and film adaptations from George Pal to Steven Spielberg, Jeff Wayne's rock opera and the numerous other works that have taken their inspiration from Wells's original. Drawing on new archival research, this is a comprehensive account of the continuing impact of The War of the Worlds.