Cinematicity in Media History

What is 'cinematicity'? What does it mean to perceive the world cinematically? How have cinematic ways of seeing the world existed across different eras, textual modes, and media? This book highlights the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other.

In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, relate both to previous or outmoded media and to what we now refer to as New Media?

This collection sets out to examine these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions and diverse forms of entertainment, demarcating their sometimes parallel and sometimes more closely conjoined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing and thinking both before and after the ''birth'' of cinema.

The examination of the interrelations between cinema, literature, photography and other modes of representation, not only to each other but amid a host of other minor and major media - the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone and the computer - provides crucial insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics. Cinematicity in Media History is therefore an essential resource for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies.