American Cinematic Novels and their Media Environments, 1925-2000 shows that a famous group of twentieth-century American novels asserted their cultural relevance through their responses to transitional moments in Hollywood film history. I select five well-known novels that engage with different transitional moments, including Hollywood’s transition to sound cinema and its response to New Hollywood: The Great Gatsby, The Day of the Locust, Lolita, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Underworld. By using narrative theory to analyze the content and form of such cinematic novels and by attending to the evolution of Hollywood cinema itself, I reveal the synergistic relations between film history, media history, and narrative techniques. Because I also grant considerable attention to how the larger “media environment” (including such forms as radio, television, video recorders, and the internet) afforded routes of exchange between cinema and the novel, my dissertation takes a new approach to the task of combining American media history with literary criticism and film history.
Based on this evidence, I also intervene in recent debates about the fate of the American novel in new media environments. I argue that even if aggregate sales of print novels continue to fall in the future, influential American novelists will win both readers and cultural prestige by shaping our understanding of new media environments and the novel’s evolving positions in them.