Faust on the Early Screen
Lorna Fitzsimmons
9789462986848
pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
The legend of the magician Faust’s pact with the devil has fascinated screen-media makers since the earliest years of experimentation
with the new medium of motion pictures. Faust on the Early Screen offers a new path for early film history. Engaging with neglected Faustian adaptations for the early screen and reinterpreting the more familiar ones, it traces the increasing naturalisation of the legend’s key metaphors within an in-depth comparative analysis of the films’ intertextual relationships (including music, magic lanterns, magic shows, féeries, and literature). By setting the films in transtextual and cultural contexts, this book provides insight into the figuration of identity in the early cinema and modern culture.
Author Bio
Lorna Fitzsimmons, PhD Full Professor, Humanities, California State University, Dominguez Hills
Expertise: five edited books on the Faust theme (The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, in production, forthcoming, OUP, 2017, principal co-editor; ed., Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland, Purdue University Press, 2016; Goethe's Faust and Cultural Memory: Comparatist Interfaces, Lehigh University Press, 2012; International Faust Studies: Adaptation, Reception, Translation, Continuum, 2008; The Lives of Faust. The Faust Theme in Literature and Music. A Reader, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008).
