The Tenth Muse explores writings on the cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus examines the impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, aesthetic and cultural consciousness, by bringing together the study of the terms and strategies of early writings about film with literary engagement with cinema in the same period. She gives a new understanding of the ways in which early writers about film - reviewers, critics, theorists - developed aesthetic categories to define and accommodate what was called 'the seventh art' or 'the tenth muse' and found discursive strategies adequate to the representation of the new art and technology of cinema, with its unprecedented powers of movement. In examining the writings of early film critics and commentators in tandem with those of more specifically literary figures, including H.G.Wells and Virginia Woolf, and in bringing literary texts into this field, Laura Marcus provides a new account of relationships between cinema and literature. Intertwining two major strands of research - the exploration of early film criticism and theory and cinema's presence in literary texts - The Tenth Muse shows how issues central to an understanding of cinema (including questions of time, repetition, movement, vision, sound and silence) are threaded through both kinds of writing, and the ways in which discursive and fictional writings overlapped. The movement that defined cinema was also perceived as a more fragile and unstable ephemerality that inhered at every level, from the fleeting nature of the projected images to the vagaries of cinematic exhibition. It was the anxiety over the mutability of the medium and its exhibition which, from the 1920s onwards, led to the establishment of such institutional spaces for cinema as the London-based Film Society, the new film journals, and, in the 1930s, the first film archives. The Tenth Muse explores the continuities between these sites of cinematic culture and the conceptual, literary and philosophical understandings of the filmic medium.

Written from an international perspective, this account of the origins of the cinema begins in 1833 with the introduction of optical toys for reproducing movement and ends with a thorough examination of the first full year of projected moving pictures in 1896. Comprehensive and verifiable, with citations that support each individual entry, the book examines the events that culminated in the establishment of the moving picture world that was the dominant visual medium of the last century. Drawing on a range of international sources, this chronology is a readable, vivid account that corrects many longstanding errors in the story of moving pictures while at the same time recording the astounding diversity of ideas, apparatus, personalities, and exhibitions that turned a passing novelty into a major industry. Populated by dreamers, inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs with widely different skills, interests, and backgrounds, the many origins of the cinema are all recorded here in a rich tapestry that has been woven with attention to the detailed shape and placement of each individual thread. The result is a fully- indexed reference that reflects the state of modern scholarship and should be useful over the long term as both a reference to the period of early cinema and as a starting point for further research.

Modern Privacies addresses emergent transformations of privacy in western societies from a multidisciplinary and international perspective. It examines social and cultural trends in new media, feminism, law, work and intimacy which indicate that our perceptions, evaluations and enactments of privacy in constant flux.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel. Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.

The recent centenary of the motion picture prompted the Belgian Royal Film Archive to compile an encyclopedia of the history of Belgian film. The country has produced a considerable cinematic output over the past hundred years, with a total of some 1,500 titles, including every imaginable genre, from documentaries to war films, romantic dramas, slapstick, animation, art movies and experimental films. This book is published in collaboration with the Royal Film Archive. The book contains a broad survey of 100 years of Belgian cinema history, from masterpieces of silent filmmaking to recent highlights like the 1992 film Daens. This comprehensive, easy-to-use, and attractively illustrated reference work is an important scholarly addition to all serious film libraries.