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Modernity and the movies
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ISBN: 9781846310591 9781846310607 1846310601 9781846310607 9781846313257 1846310598 1846313252 9781781380574 1781380570 Year: 2007 Publisher: Liverpool Liverpool University Press

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Abstract

This book investigates Wells's interest in cinema and related media technologies, by placing it back into the contemporary cultural and scientific contexts giving rise to them. It plugs a gap in understanding Wells's contribution to exploring and advancing the possibilities of cinematic narrative and its social and ideological impacts in the modern period. Previous studies concentrate on adaptations: this book accounts for the specifically (proto) cinematic techniques and concerns of Wells's texts. It also focuses on contemporary film-making 'in dialogue' with his ideas. Alongside Hollywood's later transactions, it gives equal weight to neglected British and continental European dimensions. Chapter 1 shows how early writings (The Time Machine and short stories) feature many kinds of radically defamiliarised vision. These constitute imaginative speculations about the forms and potentials of moving image and electronic media. Chapter 2 discusses the power of voyeurism, 'absent presence' and the disjunction of sound-image reproduction implied in The Invisible Man and its topical politics, updated in notable screen versions. Chapter 3 extends this to dystopian warnings of systematic surveillance, broadcasting of celebrity personae and 'post-literate' video culture in When the Sleeper Wakes, a crucial template for urban futures on film. Chapter 4 analyses Wells's belated return to screenwriting in the 1930s. It accounts for his 'broadbrow' ambition of mediating between popular and avant-garde tendencies to promote his cause and its mixed results in Things to Come, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, etc. Chapter 5 finally surveys Wells's legacy on both small and large screens. It considers whether, as well as being raided for scenarios for spectacular effects, his subtexts still nourish an evolving tradition of alternative SF, which duly critiques the innovations and applications of its host media.


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Maps of utopia : H.G. Wells, modernity, and the end of culture
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ISBN: 1306411432 0191640018 0199606595 0191738514 9780191640018 9780191738517 9780199606597 9781306411431 Year: 2012 Publisher: Oxford, England : Oxford University Press,

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This is a study of the literary theories of H.G. Wells, the founding father of English science fiction and once the most widely read writer in the world. It explores his career, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history politics, and prophecy, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction.

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