Includes bibliographical references (pages 246-258) and index. Includes filmography.
Contents:
Cinema's Authorial Proxies and Fictional Authors: Image, story, desire: the writer on film / Geoffrey Wall -- Part II. Cinema's Versions and Uses of Literary Lives: 1. The writer in film: authorship and imagination / Laura Marcus; 2. Gendered Authorship I. 'Here is the story of my career ...': the woman writer on film / Sonia Haiduc; 3. Gendered Authorship II: 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know': the male poet in Sylvia (2003) and The Edge of Love (2008) / Sian Harris; 4. Romantic Authorship. Romantic genius on screen: Jane Campion's Bright Star (2009) and Julien Temple's Pandaemonium (2000) / Julian North; 5. Authorship Iconized, Metonymized, Debunked. The 'Tables of memory': Shakespeare, cinema and the writing desk / Megan Murray-Pepper; 6. Authorship Commercialized. Brit-lit biopics, 1990-2010 / Andrew Higson; 7. Literary biopics: a literary biographer's perspective / Geoffrey Wall -- Part II. Cinema's Authorial Proxies and Fictional Authors: Fictional Writers on Screen III: Plays and Factual Reports. 14. Hemingway adapted: screening the star author / Erica Sheen; Authorial Proxies II. 9. Becoming Jane in screen adaptations of Austen's fiction / Deborah Cartmell; Authorial Proxies III. 10. Duplicated and duplicitous self-configurings in Kaufman's Adaptation (2002) / Gennelle Smith; Architectures of Accreditation. 11. Writing the endings of cinema: saving film authorship in the cinematic paratexts of Prospero's Books, Taymor's The Tempest and The Secret of Kells / Richard Burt; Fictional Writers on Screen I: Letters. 12. Deliveries of absence: epistolary structures in classical cinema / Clara Rowland; Fictional Writers on Screen II: Diaries. 13. 'Far from literature': writing as bare act in Robert Bresson's Journal d'un cureĢ de campagne (1951) / Erica Sheen; Fictional Writers on Screen III: Plays and Factual Reports. 14. Documentary li(v)es: writing falsehoods, righting wrongs in von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) / Judith Buchanan.
Summary:
"Recent years have seen a striking surge in the production of literary biopics. Writers turned cinema subject in recent films include Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lillian Hellman, Allen Ginsberg, Kafka, Keats, Kaufman, and many more. This cultural phenomenon prompts a re-examination of a long and varied history of cinematic engagements with authorial creativity. The Writer on Film examines films about writers, real and fictional, from the silent era to the present. It asks how filmmakers have narratively and iconographically configured writers' lives and acts of writing. How might the mysterious processes of a literary imagination at work be cinematically expressed? What views of inspiration, muses, redrafting and publication have films taken and how, in cinematic representation, have these been gendered? How has cinema chosen to configure the tools and symbols of writing - quills, pens, ink pots, desks, studies, typewriters, keyboards and books? And what cultural and commercial agendas are revealed in cinema's compulsive return not just to literary material (whose story is already well told) but, specifically, to literary process (whose story is not)? Case studies include Diary of a Country Priest, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Julia, My Brilliant Career, Prospero's Books, Adaptation, Shakespeare in Love, Sylvia, The Lives of Others, Becoming Jane, Atonement, Bright Star, Enid and Howl"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.