This book brings together two major strands of research: the exploration of early film criticism and theory and cinema's impact on literary texts, including the work of H.G.Wells and Virginia Woolf. It also offers new research on early writings about film, including the work of the women film critics who rose to prominence in the 1920s, and on film societies and film journals in the period.

Laura Marcus is Professor of English at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, with a number of books and articles in the fields of autobiography and biography, twentieth-century literature, modernism, psychoanalysis, and cinema.

• List of Illustrations


• Introduction


• 1: The Things that Move: Early Film and Literature


• 2: The Shadow on the Screen: Virginia Woolf and the Cinema


• 3: 'A new form of true beauty': Aesthetics and Early Film Criticism


• 4: 'The cinema mind': Film Criticism and Film Culture in 1920s Britain


• 5: The Moment of Close Up


• Coda: The Coming of Sound