Classical Hollywood, American Modernism

A Literary History of the Studio System

Jordan Brower

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009419185
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hollywood Signs
• Chapter 1 Paramount Pictures and Transmedial Possibility
• Chapter 2 MGM Modernism
• Chapter 3 The Motion Picture Industry’s Coming of Age
• Chapter 4 Global Hollywood: Parker Tyler and Malcolm Lowry, between Myth and System
• Chapter 5 The Scenes of an Ending: Adaptation, Originality, and the New Authorship of Hollywood Pictures
• Chapter 6 Conclusion: Read Anything Good Lately?
• Notes
• Index