Overview

Classical Hollywood, American Modernism charts the entwined trajectories of the Hollywood studio system and literary modernism in the United States. By examining the various ways Hollywood's industry practices inflected the imaginations of authors, filmmakers, and studios, Jordan Brower offers a new understanding of twentieth-century American and ultimately world media culture. Synthesizing archival research with innovative theoretical approaches, this book tells the story of the studio system's genesis, international dominance, decline, and continued symbolic relevance during the American postwar era through the literature it influenced. It examines the American film industry's business practices and social conditions, demonstrating how concepts like anticipated adaptation, corporate authorship, systemic development, and global distribution inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and nonfiction by modernist writers, such as Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Patsy Ruth Miller, Nathanael West, Parker Tyler, Malcolm Lowry, and James Baldwin.

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9781009419208

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Reviews

'… one of those rare books that contributes to two fields, rather than using insights from one to make arguments on behalf of the other … In addition to remarkable historical research, the book also offers significant interpretations of both canonical and less-frequently-studied modernist literature, which should prove inspiring both for future scholarship and the teaching of these works. … This book will doubtless push the field forward as scholars continue to consider what happened when authors went to the movies and Hollywood hit the bookshelf.' Katherine Fusco, The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945 'As I write, the emergent rallying cry of 'Stop the Oligarchy' analogizes more to the Gilded Age than to Classical Hollywood. Yet today's anti-oligarchy sentiment is often directed at Silicon Valley tycoons, who have consumed much of Hollywood itself through streaming services, wrought a new kind of culture industry by commodifying our very attention beyond ideological propaganda, and are now trying to deaccession government itself. Brower's account of the studio system provides an important analysis of how such oligarchical sausage once got made at the nexus of entertainment, art, and anti-trust law by charting how literary authors, the publishing industry, and classical studios adapted to each other, in every sense, for better or worse.' H. N. Lukes, Modernism/modernity

Author Information

Jordan Brower is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He coedited American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Wai Chee Dimock et al., 2016). His work has appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, ELH: English Literary History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, James Joyce Quarterly, and Modern Language Quarterly.

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