Literature in Motion: Black Authors and the Movies

The book…is…everywhere,” lamented Henry James in 1899. And so it must have seemed, thanks to advancements in transport, communications and printing technologies that together effected an explosion of print, transforming US literary culture across the early decades of the 20^th century. Strikingly absent from the scholarship is the significant contribution of motion pictures to these transformations. In this paper, I sketch the argument of my recent book, Silent Film and the Formations of US Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (Oxford UP 2024), and then show how motion pictures provided Black authors a means to navigate the gnarly terrain of authorship during the Jim Crow era.

Bio

Sarah Gleeson-White is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Sydney. She has published widely in the areas of early-twentieth-century US literature and film, and is the author, most recently, of Silent Film and the Formations of US Literary Culture: Literature in Motion (Oxford UP 2024).