This book brings together research from medical and film archives to illustrate the cultural impact of film and literature in its relationship to the discourse of plastic surgery in the 1920s. This different take on reading the body after the First World War enables students of multiple disciplines, and readers interested in both Hollywood and post-war culture, to understand some of the complexities of medical interventions gained after the First World War and the way in which they filtered into the world of Hollywood film making. It also allows readers who may not be familiar with these two 1920s stars to access the films of Lon Chaney and the books and films of Elinor Glyn and gain new insights into 1920s visual culture. For ease of readership, the book is organised so that each of the main chapters focuses on a particular film (either Lon Chaney or Elinor Glyn). This is particularly useful for use in the classroom or for online education. Readers can refer to the film directly, aided by illustrations of frames from the films. This book tells the story of how two stars of Hollywood film transformed their character’s faces on screen through a close reading of three films in the 1920s. It reveals how they applied their embodied knowledge of surgery and surgical procedures to broaden their audience’s emotional and intellectual understanding of the treatment of deformity and disability.
Lon Chaney, Elinor Glyn. Film and novel adaptations.
This book reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Elinor Glyn’s life and legacy by film scholars and literary and feminist historians and offers a range of views of Glyn’s cultural and historical significance and areas for future research.
Elinor Glyn was a celebrity figure in the 1920s. In the magazines she gave tips on beauty and romance, on keeping your man and on the contentious issue of divorce. Her racy stories were turned into films – most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). Decades on the ‘It Girl’ remains in common currency, defining the sexy, sassy and alluring young woman. She was beloved by readers of romance, and her films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. They were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others – Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church – as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. This book features scholarship by Stacy Gillis, Annette Kuhn, Nickianne Moody, Caterina Riba and Carme Sanmartí, Lisa Stead, Karen Randell, and Alexis Weedonand includes, translated for the first time, the intertitles for Márton Garas, 1917 film of Three Weeks, Három hét by Orsolya Zsuppán.
See also the open access chapter Alexis Weedon (2018) An Introduction to Elinor Glyn: Her Life and Legacy, Women: A Cultural Review, 29:2, 145-160, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2018.1447042
This collection of essays by international scholars celebrates the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins’s birth by exploring his unconventional life alongside his works, critical responses to his writings and their afterlife, and the literary and cultural contexts which shaped his fiction. Topics discussed include gender, science and medicine, music, law, race and empire, media adaptations contributed by Alexis Weedon, neo-Victorianism, disability, and ethics. Along with an analysis of his novels, the essays included also recognize the importance of his short stories, journalism, and contributions to Victorian theatre, most notably illuminating the strong connections between sensation fiction and melodrama, as well as exploring his influence on film and TV. Engaging with yet also delving far beyond the famous novels, this volume promotes awareness of Collins’ remarkable and diverse writerly achievements and paints a vivid portrait of an author whose fluctuating reputation among contemporary critics stands in stark contrast to his immense and still-enduring popularity.
Adaptations of Wilkie Collins’ stories on screen and in audio dramatisations
This book explores the significance of professional writers and their role in developing British storytelling in the 1920s and 1930s, and their influence on the poetics of today’s transmedia storytelling. Modern techniques can be traced back to the early twentieth century when film, radio and television provided professional writers with new formats and revenue streams for their fiction. The book explores the contribution of four British authors, household names in their day, who adapted work for film, television and radio. Although celebrities between the wars, Clemence Dane, G.B. Stern, Hugh Walpole and A.E.W Mason have fallen from view. The popular playwright Dane, witty novelist Stern and raconteur Walpole have been marginalised for being German, Jewish, female or gay and Mason’s contribution to film has been overlooked also. It argues that these and other vocational authors should be reassessed for their contribution to new media forms of storytelling. The book makes a significant contribution in the fields of media studies, adaptation studies, and the literary middlebrow.
Winifred Ashton (Clemence Dane) and her appreciation of the storytelling abilities of Gladys Stern, Hugh Walpole and A.E.W. Mason in print and on screen.
The first full-length study of the authorial and cross-media practices of the English novelist Elinor Glyn (1864-1943), Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman examines Glyn’s work as a novelist in the United Kingdom followed by her success in Hollywood where she adapted her popular romantic novels into films. Making extensive use of newly available archival materials, Vincent L. Barnett and Alexis Weedon explore Glyn’s experiences from multiple perspectives, including the artistic, legal and financial aspects of the adaptation process. At the same time, they document Glyn’s personal and professional relationships with a number of prominent individuals in the Hollywood studio system, including Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. The authors contextualize Glyn’s involvement in scenario-writing in relationship to other novelists in Hollywood, such as Edgar Wallace and Arnold Bennett, and also show how Glyn worked across Europe and America to transform her stories into other forms of media such as plays and movies. Providing a new perspective from which to understand the historical development of both British and American media industries in the first half of the twentieth century, this book will appeal to historians working in the fields of cultural and film studies, publishing and business history.
Elinor Glyn and the business side of authorship and film making.
How do cultural planners and policymakers work through the arts to create communities? What do artists and storytellers need to build a sense of place in their community? To discuss these issues, Developing a Sense of Place brings together new models and case studies, each drawn from a specific geographical or socio-cultural context.
Cinderella’s transformation from a lowly, overlooked servant into a princess who attracts everyone’s gaze has become a powerful trope within many cultures. Inspired by the Cinderella archive of books and collectables at the University of Bedfordshire, the essays in this collection demonstrate how the story remains active in various different societies where social and family relationships are adapting to modern culture. The volume explores the social arenas of dating apps and prom nights, as well as contemporary issues about women’s roles in the home, and gender identity.
Cinderella’s cultural translation is seen through the contributors’ international perspectives: from Irish folklore to the Colombian Cenicienta costeña (Cinderella of the coast) and Spanish literary history. Its transdisciplinarity ranges from fashion in Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s publications to a comparison of Cinderella and Galatea on film, and essays on British authors Nancy Spain, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Frances Hodgson Burnett.