Ralph Ellison and Cinema
Sam Halliday
Select Format
Title Details
- ISBN: 9781785279652
- June 2025
- Pages: 250
- Imprint: Anthem Press
Ralph Ellison and Cinema reveals the crucial role of cinema throughout Ellison’s career. In his most famous work, Invisible Man (1952), cinema is part of a cultural and institutional landscape; as such, it is integral to the way the novel’s protagonist feels and thinks. In Ellison’s critical essays, cinema is simultaneously a crystallization of racial prejudice, a vehicle of ideas about history, and an index of the variously illusory and the revelatory character of dreams. But it is in his monumental, unfinished second novel, posthumously published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010), that Ellison’s thinking about cinema is brought to its imaginative and theoretical peak. Here, Ellison gives full rein to a sensibility that is both cinephile and cine-sceptical; in the book, Ellison is as much concerned with cinematic form as he is with cinematic content. To chart the breadth and depth of Ellison’s cinematic interests, Ralph Ellison and Cinema discusses the author’s major works alongside private correspondence, Hollywood films in which Ellison took particular interest, and marginalia in the author’s personal library. Ralph Ellison and Cinema also provides a detailed account of the intellectual and social contexts in which Ellison’s works took shape.
Sam Halliday teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.
Introduction; Chapter 1. Peanut Gallery and ‘Mental Screen’: Cinema as Institution, Paradigm and Metaphor; Chapter 2. The Shadow and the Act: the Critique of Hollywood and the Performativity of Race; Chapter 3. The Reel and the Frame-Line: Cinematic Form and Filmic Time.
Related products
-
Dramatic Movement of African American Women
The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class
September, 2022
£110.00 / $110.00 -
Black Refigurations
Facing, Naming and Voicing in African-American Literature, Volume III
February, 2025
£35.00 / $35.00 -
Black Refigurations
Facing, Naming and Voicing in African-American Literature, Volume III
February, 2025
£35.00 / $35.00 -
-
Black Configurations
The Ethos of “Tradition” from Sterling Brown to Toni Morrison, Volume I
May, 2024
£110.00 / $110.00 -
Performing Memories and Weaving Archives:
Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean
May, 2022
£24.95 / $24.95
