Literature and Sound Film in Mid-Century Britain

What happened to cinema and literature when synchronized sound was introduced to the film industry in the late 1920s? Literature and Sound Film in Mid-Century Britain studies the paths of film and text following this event. It asks how British cinema responded to the introduction of sound and how mid-century literature took up the challenge of the synchronized, audio-visual entertainment experience offered by this media change.

By examining the technological and industrial histories of film and its narrative strategies and by drawing links to twentieth-century literary culture, this study offers a new way of approaching mid-century writing and its media ecology. Developing innovative, audio-visual close readings, this book offers a multi-sensory, multi-media approach that reframes the relationships between cinema and literature in the twentieth century. The study addresses a wide range of film genres, such as musical film, screwball comedy, the thriller, documentary, and melodrama alongside the writings of a large group of authors including Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Hamilton, Evelyn Waugh, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Henry Green, Jean Rhys, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Eric Ambler. It covers an expansive range of films and texts of the 1930s and 1940s and invites readers to comprehensively rethink mid-century media culture by arguing for a growing synergy of film and text.

Lara Ehrenfried, Postdoctoral researcher, LMU Munich

Lara Ehrenfried completed her PhD in English Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Durham in 2020. In October 2021, she took up her current post as a postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich. Her research considers the intersections of sound, visual culture, and literature. Literature and Sound Film in Mid-Century Britain is her first monograph.