The usual view of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose is that it is a matter of writing fast without reflection, and the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in April 1951 by typing/composing the whole novel onto a roll of paper in a three-week marathon presumably legitimizes this view. However, this chapter argues that we should understand Spontaneous Prose as a reinvention of textuality rather than simply a matter of writing fast and without reflection, which in turn allows us to understand Kerouac’s responsiveness to modern media (film and analogue recording in particular) to the paradigm of conventional print textuality, bringing into view his development of what might be termed “post-print textuality” in even his seemingly more conventionally written novels. Ultimately, this chapter shows that Kerouac’s experiments with textuality rewrote the standards by which “good literature” in the postwar era was measured.

After the publication of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s Juan Moreira (1879), its successful theatricaladaptation, and the numerous narratives about rebellious gauchos that followed, the set ofpractices and discourses that create a sense of belonging around the figure of the gaucho hascome to be known under the umbrella term of criollismo. Although recent research has shownthat criollismo did not disappear in the early twentieth century but converted to other nonliterary media, no approach considers the relationship between criollismo and cinema in thelong term and on a global level. In doing just this, this chapter focuses on the crossingbetween criollismo and cinema by looking at the images of the nation that gaucho-themed filmsbring into play. It explores how a repertoire of themes, characters, arguments, and landscapesdisseminated by criollista literature was adapted to film, projected globally in Hollywood movies, and then reappropriated by the local culture. Finally, it argues that this feedbackbetween criollista literature and film was fruitful until the late 1970s, when – after reaching a high level of violence – the political uses of criollismo became less massive and more sporadic.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

Here I will be interested in points of resistance and incompatibility between Shakespeare and film genres, in particular the case of Romeo and Juliet and the Western. One might expect that Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s most bankable play, would be an obvious candidate for adaptation into a Western, one of cinema’s most popular genres. In theory, it is certainly possible to bend the play and the genre in each other’s direction. In practice, however, Romeo and Juliet has seemed difficult to adapt as a Western. Why this is so tells us something about the limits of Shakespeare’s adaptability within film genres.

Of Shakespeare’s plays, none is so commonly adapted and appropriated in forms targeted towards youth audiences as Romeo and Juliet. This chapter considers three film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet through the lens of each film’s engagement with youth, and through their use of setting, props, performance and cinematography to affect, and thereby, emphasize the anguish of (and in) youth. It will be argued that each film’s means of affecting anguish requires a connection to youth as a privileged time of allowable indulgence. Anguish emerges as simultaneously pleasurable in its existential engagement, and painful in its tragic realism, and the effect is a privileging of anguish over the catharsis that conventionally concludes tragedy, leaving anguish and youth sustained indefinitely.

This chapter will explore Zeffirelli’s film in the context of the 1960s by briefly looking back at his stage production and then forward to the film’s seminal influence on significant stage and film productions in the 1980s, 1990s and new millennium. These will include Ron Daniels’s spirited 1980 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film and Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s 2016 London staging with Richard Madden, Lily James and Derek Jacobi.

This chapter analyses the film Ram-Leela using rasa theory, examining the dramatic ways in which the film evokes emotion – for example, through the use of colour, cinematography and music – and conveys meaning through direct and indirect references to Hindu mythological figures and narratives. Rasa theory, and its religious referents, are especially efficacious for approaching Ram-Leela as its title, which literally names the two main characters Ram (Romeo) and Leela (Juliet), is also the name of one of the most significant sacred celebrations in India’s Hindu calendar, Ramlila, an annual autumn festival during which plays are performed that present the life of the god Rama from his birth. Many scholars have discussed the key importance of the story of King Rama and his wife Sita in the narratives featured in Bollywood cinema. Ram-Leela plays with these conventions, participating vividly in the impassioned expression of emotion called for in rasa theory, performing far outside the boundaries of realism, whilst also departing in significant, telling ways from both the narrative of the Ramayana and that of Romeo and Juliet.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

The present chapter seeks to provide a selective reference guide to the screen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet up to 2021. This chapter is divided into three sections listing films, television adaptations as well as derivatives and citations. In each section, adaptations are classified in chronological order followed by an alphabetical list of relevant critical studies, and a system of cross-references has been designed for those entries making reference to two or more adaptations.

In this chapter, I focus on the Bengali-language Arshinagar (2015) directed by Aparna Sen, and the Hindi-language Dhadak (2018) written and directed by Shashank Khaitan. Both films are adaptations of Romeo and Juliet that place the play within the context of current socio-political issues of communalism and honour killings in India.

In Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 screen adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, water is a significant visual element: the lovers meet through the medium of a fish tank; they float in the Hollywood pool like cosmic bodies for the balcony scene; and in death their fluid union is re-visited. This chapter argues that Luhrmann draws from the language of the play-text to conflate celestial and aquatic space in innovative ways in his screen iconography, and that these metaphorical spaces that intersect love and death, are further enhanced through the paratexts of the accompanying film soundtrack, which has had its own successful afterlife trajectory (released through Capitol Records as two separate volumes, 1996 and 1997, and re-released in 2007 for the tenth anniversary).

This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.

This chapter offers a “conceptual geography” of the ways irony is expressed and understood through several representations of irony, as seen, for example, in fiction and film. Currie draws the careful distinction between cases where an event is represented as being ironic without the event itself being ironic (e.g., a film scene may be constructed to express irony without the scene itself necessarily being an example of situational irony). Dramatic irony, for example, often succeeds because of our knowing something that the characters do not. But the characters’ lack of knowledge is only a pointer to the irony and is not what actually constitutes the irony. Many so-called instance of verbal irony are “expressive,” but not really “communicative,” because they are expressive of an ironic state of mind without a speaker specifically aiming to communicate irony. Currie’s chapter dives into many of these complexities, which are too often ignored in theoretical discussions and explications of irony. His overarching aim is to raise our awareness about what should be counted as irony and what “should be abandoned as the product of an inflated vocabulary.”

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.