Examines womens constructions of selfhood through film and literature in interwar BritainOff to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Womens Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain offers a rich new exploration of interwar womens fictions and their complex intersections with cinema. Interrogating a range of writings, from newspapers and magazines to middlebrow and modernist fictions, the book takes the reader through the diverse print and storytelling media that women constructed around interwar film-going, arguing that literary forms came to constitute an intermedial gendered cinema culture at this time.Using detailed case studies, this innovative book draws upon new archival research, industrial analysis and close textual readings to consider cinemas place in the fictions and critical writings of major literary figures such as Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A. Lejeune and Iris Barry. Through the lens of feminist film historiography, Off to the Pictures presents a bold new view of interwar cinema culture, read through the creative reflections of the women who experienced it.

Discusses the overlooked works of Bradbury and Lodge in terms of their critical reception, Bakhtin's theory of the dialogical novel, and their relation to British literature and contemporary literature in general. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

David Lodge is internationally celebrated as a novelist and critic, and, more recently, as a writer for television. This study examines his work from The Picturegoers (1960) to Therapy (1995). There are chapters on Lodge's early, mainly realistic, fiction; on his trilogy of campus novels, Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work; and on his interest, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes deeply serious, in Catholicism, notably in How Far Can You Go? and Paradise News. Lodge's practice as a novelist has been paralleled over the years by his work as a literary critic and theorist who is keenly interested in fictional form. There is an account of his critical writing, and the study concludes with an assessment of Lodge's achievement as a best-selling novelist with intellectual interests in criticismand theology, who has successfully brought together observant realism, metafictional consciousness and dazzling comedy.

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.

David Lodge is a much-loved novelist and influential literary critic. Examining his career from his earliest publications in the late 1950s to his more recent works, David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel identifies Lodge's central place within the canon of twentieth-century British literature. J. Russell Perkin argues that liberalism is the defining feature of Lodge's identity as a novelist, critic, and Roman Catholic intellectual, and demonstrates that Graham Greene, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Henry James, and H.G. Wells are the key influences on Lodge's fiction. Perkin also considers Lodge's relationship to contemporary British novelists, including Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, and Monica Ali. In a study that is both theoretically informed and accessible to the general reader, Perkin shows that Lodge's work is shaped by the dialectic of modernism and the realist tradition. Through an approach that draws on diverse theories of literary influence and history, David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel provides the most thorough treatment of the novelist's career to date.

In the opening section of these related studies of modern literature, Bernard Bergonzi considers the poetry and fiction of two World Wars, including discussions of Wilfred Owen, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Pat Barker’s Regeneration, and the poetry of the Desert War of the 1940s. The second section deals with a number of prominent twentieth-century authors. Among other subjects, it looks at Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as a novel anticipating the Great War, the treatment of memory in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and aspects of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, responding to arguments about its anti-semitism. The final section is on Catholic writers, from Hopkins and Chesterton to Graham Greene and David Lodge. The book continues Bergonzi’s extensive career as a critic and literary historian of the modern period, and takes a fresh look at the subjects of some of the earlier books, such as Hopkins, Eliot, Wells, and the literature of war.

Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. Discusses various films, including the Alien quartet, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Derek Jarman’s The Garden. Draws on a wide range of authors, both ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Plato to Levinas, from Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to André Bazin and Leo Bersani. Uses cinema to think about the church as an ecclesiacinema, and films to think about sexual desire as erotic dispossession, as a way into the life of God. Written from a radically orthodox Christian perspective, at once both Catholic and critical.