Cranfield, J The Pen, the Page & the Screen: British Authorship and Americanization in the Age of Silent Cinema. Twentieth Century Literature: a scholarly and critical journal. ISSN 0041-462X (Accepted)

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Abstract

How did the rise of cinema affect authorship in Britain? This article examines the question in relation to both new and established writers. It refers to manuals of authorship and fiction writing as well as to the archives of the Society of Authors. It places the rise of cinema after 1906 in the context of broader patterns of the ‘Americanisation’ of the culture industry and illustrates the ways in which cinema drove changes to readerly expectation, advertising and the marketing of literature. It also examines how the business of writing for the cinema came to be incorporated into the broadly professionalized concept of ‘authorship.’ The argument refers to the experiences of a range of authors including W. Somerset Maugham, E. Philips Oppenheim, Elinor Glyn, Arnold Bennet and Edgar Jepson as well as tracing the impact of figures from within the cinema trade (Herbert Langford Reed and Eliot Stannard) who sought to integrate scriptwriting with the other disciplines traditionally described by the term ‘authorship’.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Authorship; Twentieth-Century Fiction; Cinema and Literature; Society of Authors; 2005 Literary Studies
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Divisions:	Humanities & Social Science
Publisher:	Duke University Press
SWORD Depositor:	A Symplectic
Date Deposited:	08 Dec 2023 16:35
Last Modified:	08 Dec 2023 16:45
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/22059

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