Title: The nickel was for the movies
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.
Subjects: Fiction, History and criticism, Motion pictures in literature, Roman français, Cinéma et littérature, Cinéma, Histoire et critique, Dans la littérature, Roman, Cinéma dans la littérature, Fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, Motion pictures and literature
Time periods: 20th century