The nickel was for the movies
Subtitle: film in the novel from Pirandello to Puig
By: Gavriel Moses.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
Subjects: Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Motion pictures in literature.
Description: The cinephobic novelist who complains to Fitzgerald's tycoon that he will never get the hang of scriptwriting probably wouldn't give a nickel for the movies. Yet with the invention of film, human perception was engaged in a more all-encompassing way than it ever had been by a single art form.

In this ambitious investigation of a previously undefined narrative genre, Gavriel Moses exposes and explores the film novel, a literary text in which cinema provides the thematic, formal, psychological, and philosophical center.

Through close readings of works by the major representatives of the genre - Pirandello, Nabokov, Isherwood, West, Fitzgerald, Moravia, Percy, and Puig - Moses develops a persuasive theory to account for the novels that exploit the central role film has acquired in human experience.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-315) and index.