Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature

This book goes beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to show how naturalism and early cinema intervened in the era's experiments with temporality and time management. It shows how US naturalist novels are constructed around a formal and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal inexorability and that the early film developed in the context of naturalist experiments with time. Fusco identifies the silent cinema and naturalist novel's privileging of narrative progress over character development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns from systems of representation, to historiography, labor reform, miscegenation, and birth control.

Katherine Fusco is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, US.

Introduction: Progress Without People 1. Unnatural Time: Frank Norris at the Cinema's Beginnings 2. Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show: Frank Norris, D.W. Griffith, and Naturalist Editing 3. Made of Leavings and Scraps: Jack London, Jack Johnson, and Racial Time 4. Systems, Not Men: Processes without People in Utopian Factory Films and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Eusocial Feminism. Epilogue: Scaling up to Modernism.