Literature and Sound Film in Mid-Century Britain

What happened to cinema and literature when synchronized sound was introduced to the film industry in the late 1920s? Literature and Sound Film in Mid-Century Britain studies the paths of film and text following this event. It asks how British cinema responded to the introduction of sound and how mid-century literature took up the challenge of the synchronized, audio-visual entertainment experience offered by this media change.

By examining the technological and industrial histories of film and its narrative strategies and by drawing links to twentieth-century literary culture, this study offers a new way of approaching mid-century writing and its media ecology. Developing innovative, audio-visual close readings, this book offers a multi-sensory, multi-media approach that reframes the relationships between cinema and literature in the twentieth century. The study addresses a wide range of film genres, such as musical film, screwball comedy, the thriller, documentary, and melodrama alongside the writings of a large group of authors including Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Hamilton, Evelyn Waugh, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Henry Green, Jean Rhys, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Eric Ambler. It covers an expansive range of films and texts of the 1930s and 1940s and invites readers to comprehensively rethink mid-century media culture by arguing for a growing synergy of film and text.