Overview

Ben-Hur was the first literary blockbuster to generate multiple and hugely profitable adaptations, highlighted by the 1959 film that won a record-setting 11 Oscars.General Lew Wallace's book was spun off into dozens of popular publications and media productions, becoming a veritable commercial brand name that earned tens of millions of dollars. Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster surveys the Ben-Hur phenomenon's unprecedented range and extraordinary endurance: various editions, spin-off publications, stage productions, movies, comic books, radio plays, and retail products were successfully marketed and sold from the 1880s and throughout the twentieth century. Today Ben-Hur Live is touring Europe and Asia, with a third MGM film in production in Italy. Jon Solomon's new book offers an exciting and detailed study of the Ben-Hur brand, tracking its spectacular journey from Wallace's original novel through to twenty-first century adaptations, and encompassing a wealth of previously unexplored material along the way

Full Product Details

Author:   Jon Solomon (Robert D. Novak Professor of Western Civilization and Culture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.20cm , Height: 5.30cm , Length: 24.40cm
Weight:   1.900kg
ISBN:  

9781474407946

ISBN 10:   1474407943
Pages:   928
Publication Date:   04 April 2016
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

A Note About The Hyphen: Ben-Hur Vs Ben Hur; 1. The First Blockbuster; 2. Lew Wallace Before Ben-Hur; 3. “How I Came To Write Ben-Hur”; 4. Publication And Early Reception Of The Novel; 5. The Transformations Of The Novel; 6. Reasons For Success; 7. Early Staged Readings: Ben-Hur, In Tableaux And Pantomime; 8. Ben-Hur In Song And Instrumental Music; 9. My God! Did I Set All This Into Motion?”: The Klaw & Erlanger Ben-Hur; 10. “Ben-Hur Flour Has The Go To Make The Dough”: Early Ben-Hur Commerce; 11. Ben-Hur In Moving Pictures: Stereopticon Lectures And The 1907 Kalem Ben-Hur”; 12. “The Greatest Motion Picture Property In The History Of The Screen”: The 1925 Mgm Ben-Hur; 13. Between The Mgm Films; 14. The World’s Most Honored Motion Picture”: The 1959 Mgm Ben-Hur; 15. The Next Half-Century: New Formats And New Versions; 16. Bibliography.

Reviews

"Jon Solomon here sets a new standard for scholarship on the reception of antiquity in the media age. His book is an epic in its own right: a thorough treatment of an astonishing literary phenomenon that still pervades our popular arts and commercial culture, even legal history.--Martin Winkler, George Mason University He has collected an unimaginable amount of material and has thus created a Ben-Hur lexicon that, for a long time, will serve as a reference book for all future stories about the famous Roman and his later works.(translated from German)--Kresimir Matijevic, Europa-Universitat Flensburg ""Thersites"""

Author Information

Jon Solomon is Robert D. Novak Professor of Western Civilization and Culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Giovanni Boccaccio: The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (Harvard University Press, 2011), The Ancient World in the Cinema: Revised and Expanded Edition (Yale University Press, 2001), Ptolemy's Harmonics: Translation and Commentary (Brill, 1999), The Ancient World in the Cinema (A. S. Barnes & Co, 1978), Ancient Roman Feasts and Recipes (E. A. Seemann, 1977), The Complete Three Stooges (C3 Entertainment, 2001). He is editor of Accessing Antiquity: The Computerization of Classics Studies (University of Arizona Press, 1993), Apollo: Origins and Influences (University of Arizona Press, 1994) and Ancient Worlds in Film and Television: Gender and Politics (Brill, 2013).

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