British Authorship in the Age of Silent Cinema : The Pen, the Page and the Screen

Tracing the impact of the emergence of silent film on the culture industry in Britain in the early 20th century, this book reveals how cinema came to redefine contemporary authorship and publishing at the time.

Using hitherto unexplored archival material and periodicals, it provides an author’s-eye view of these changes to literary culture as novelists, journalists and essayists found themselves writing for readers whose expectations had been transformed by their experiences of cinema. Examining the debates that raged at the time, including whether film would supplant print media, the book demonstrates how it did in fact devour and regurgitate them all to propagate a new, globalized culture industry by canalizing American popular culture directly to British audiences.

Structured around a detailed exploration of the Society of Authors as an organization, the book also studies the individual careers of those writers associated with it including Walter Besant, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Elinor Glyn, E. M. Hull and W. Somerset Maugham. Shedding light on the subsequent evolutions of literary forms such as the short story, how publishers and booksellers adapted to an Americanized marketplace, and how authors joined the fight for screenwriters to be ‘credited’ on screen, British Authorship in the Age of Silent Cinema lays bare the changes that befell the business of writing for a living in an age of unprecedented turmoil and national decline.