Classical Hollywood, American Modernism

Classical Hollywood, American Modernism charts the entwined trajectories of the Hollywood studio system and literary modernism in the United States. By examining the various ways Hollywood's industry practices inflected the imaginations of authors, filmmakers, and studios, Jordan Brower offers a new understanding of twentieth-century American and ultimately world media culture. Synthesizing archival research with innovative theoretical approaches, this book tells the story of the studio system's genesis, international dominance, decline, and continued symbolic relevance during the American postwar era through the literature it influenced. It examines the American film industry's business practices and social conditions, demonstrating how concepts like anticipated adaptation, corporate authorship, systemic development, and global distribution inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and nonfiction by modernist writers, such as Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Patsy Ruth Miller, Nathanael West, Parker Tyler, Malcolm Lowry, and James Baldwin.

Jordan Brower is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He coedited American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Wai Chee Dimock et al., 2016). His work has appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, ELH: English Literary History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, James Joyce Quarterly, and Modern Language Quarterly.