Description:

Everyone is familiar with H.G. Wells’s pioneering works of science fiction, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man —but fewer realize how these works helped to technically develop the cinematic narrative. An appealing and accessible study aimed at the student of modernism and early cinema, H.G. Wells, Modernity, and the Movies reconsiders Well’s advancement of the cinematic narrative alongside the social and political impact of early media. Including rare illustrations from the original magazines which published Wells’s early work, this groundbreaking study will be of interest to anyone concerned with Wells, his work, and the technological parameters of modern culture.

Review

Williams's study captures Well's interaction with cinema comprehensively. The Wellsian, No. 31 2008 Wellsian scholars will appreciate H. G. Wells: Modernity and the Movies for its freshness and insight. The book also provides an excellent framework for a course on Wells that studies the interactions for his work in written and cinematic forms. Science Fiction Studies, Volume 35 2008 Keith Williams's H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies reckons in very different terms with another figure who carried his Victorianism into the twentieth century, Williams looks not only at Wells's actual writings about and engagements with early cinema but also at ways in which his work anticipated-or, indeed, pioneered-"filmic" techniques and habits of perception before film itself had fully arrived. Here the book joins recent work in media studies that seeks to uncover the technological infrastructures of historical ways of seeing and feeling. While never quite free of the risk of retroactively conforming its object of study to a subsequently apparent development path, Williams's close readings of the links with particular optical technologies and efforts in Wells's writing are never less than resourceful and engaging. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Nineteenth Century Volume 50, Number 4 2010

About the Author

Keith Williams is senior lecturer in English literature at Dundee University and a recent consultant to BBC 4’s trilogy of programs on the history of British science fiction, The Martians and Us.