James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film - Paperback

by Keith Williams (Author)

Investigates how the cinematic tendency of Joyce's writing developed from media predating film

• First comprehensive consideration of Joyce in the context of pre-filmic 'cinematicity'.
• Research and analysis based on recent 'media archaeology'.
• Examines the shaping of Joyce's fiction by late-Victorian visual culture and science.
• Shows that key aspects of his literary experimentation derive from 'forgotten' popular cultural practices and 'vernacular modernism'.
• Shows Joyce's interaction with and critique of Modernity's developing 'media cultural imaginary'.

In this book, Keith Williams explores Victorian culture's emergent 'cinematicity' as a key creative driver of Joyce's experimental fiction, showing how Joyce's style and themes share the cinematograph's roots in Victorian optical entertainment and science. The book reveals Joyce's references to optical toys, shadowgraphs, magic lanterns, panoramas, photographic analysis and film peepshows. Close analyses of his works show how his techniques elaborated and critiqued their effects on modernity's 'media-cultural imaginary'.

Author Biography

Keith Williams is Reader in English at the University of Dundee and Director of the Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures. He has chaired the Scottish Word and Image Group and served on the executive board of the International Association of Word and Image Studies. He has published several books and many articles on literature and inter-mediality in the early twentieth century, especially on H.G. Wells and James Joyce.