Dickens and the dream of cinema / Grahame Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Grahame.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Film adaptations.

Dickens, Charles.

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.

Genre:

Film adaptations.

Physical Description:

x, 206 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2003.

Summary:

Dickens and the dream of cinema seeks to dissolve the barriers between literary and film studies. Grahame Smith, a major Dickens scholar who has also taught, researched and published in the field of film, suggests that Dicken's work plays a seminal role in the emergence of cinema. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin's concept of each epoch dreaming the epoch that is to follow, Smith argues that Dickens's novels can be regarded as proto-filmic in the detail of their language as well as their larger formal structures. This possibility arises from Dickens's creative engagement with the city as metropolis, as it emerges in the London of the 1830s. Dickens's immersion in the visual entertainments of his own day, such as the panorama, and his interest in railway travel are also important ingredients in this anticipation of film. The book suggests a new way of reading Dickens by way of a form which only came into existence after his death, while simultaneously offering an account of his part in the manifold forces that led to the appearance of film towards the end of the nineteenth century. This original and groundbreaking study will appeal both to the many readers of Dickens and to students of early and silent cinema.

Contents:

1 Exploratory 1

2 Machines and things: seeing and being seen 18

3 Explanations 45

4 London as labyrinth

Paris as panorama 62

5 The magic carpet of technology 82

6 Dickens, theatre and spectacle 102

7 The impurity of art 119

8 Novel into film: the case of Little Dorrit 137

9 Language and form 152

A dream epilogue: Charles Dickens and Orson Welles 176.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [197]-202) and index.

ISBN:

0719055628

0719055636

OCLC:

51780285