| Summary: | <p>This thesis examines how the reading and writing of the post-war British novel is altered by the emergence of an 'everyday' cinema-going culture amongst young people in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The thesis demonstrates how viewing and reading practices converge in the twentieth-century and how the resulting modification of the visual literacy of this new, 'movie-made' generation of 'cinesthetic' writers and readers refigures realism in this period. Such cinesthetic realism can be differentiated from the modernist mode of the 'camera-eye' by how it elicits interactive (and often sexist) affects and leads to techniques such as 'indexical characterisation' and a consideration of 'extratextual' narratives. Thus, the thesis argues for the post-war period as one of literary innovation as opposed to the regressive, anti-modern epoch it is still widely labelled.</p> <p>The work encompasses a broad range of novels and novelists: 'Invitations to a Candy-Floss World?' explains how John Braine's 'documentary' fiction engages with cinematic escapism, how Colin MacInnes incorporates cinema-going as an emblem of marginalisation, and how Alan Sillitoe positions cinema as a 'valid' literary influence; 'I Could Have Bitten Her' examines the influence of Philip Larkin's addiction to cinema in his debut novel, John Wain's investigation of the cinesthetic reification of the post-war novelist, and Kingsley Amis' extratextual and (surprisingly) feminist endeavours; 'Passionate Detachment' explores Muriel Spark's employment of cinema to represent a crisis in feminine ipseity, Lynne Reid Banks' use of 'sexist' cinema as a proto-feminist trope (in conjunction with an interview with Banks), and Iris Murdoch's relationship with cinema as 'Plato's Cave', which leads to refigurations of realism and feminist forms of escape.</p> <p>Ultimately, this thesis aims to foreground an underestimated aspect of the transition between the 'late modernist' and the 'contemporary' in British fiction.</p>
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