Film and Fiction: Word into Image

Moving pictures in the silent era and moving pictures with recorded sounds after 1927, has been used to tell stories, describe events, imitate human actions, expose problems, and urge reforms. It is not therefore surprising that such uses would provoke speculative comparisons with other major human systems for telling, describing, imitating, exposing and urging – verbal language. The twenty-two essays in this volume deal primarily with the interrelation of the two art forms – fiction and film. An entirely twentieth century phenomenon, this interrelation not only developed a cinematic imagination in novelists, but also added new dimensions to the modernist worldview. Divided under four categories, the essays discuss film and literary narrative theories, analyse different Hollywood genres, speak of individual associations of writers with the ‘liveliest art of the century,’ and also delve into the problems of adapting of individual texts.