Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Womenâ (Tm)S Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain

'Lisa Stead's methodologically sophisticated and impeccably researched study of women and cinema culture between the wars brings under the spotlight a transformative moment when popular media, modernity, modernism and femininity came together in shaping unprecedented new ways of being a woman.'Annette Kuhn, Queen Mary University of LondonOff to the Pictures offers a rich new exploration of gendered cultures of cinema between the wars, and their complex intersections with literary media. Examining a range of writings, from newspapers and magazines to middlebrow and modernist fictions, Lisa Stead argues that the diverse storytelling media that women constructed around filmgoing came to constitute a gendered intermedial movie culture at this time. Looking at the writings of figures such as Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A. Lejeune and Iris Barry, the book draws upon new archival research and close textual readings to interrogate a literary preoccupation with the figure of the female cinemagoer.A series of case studies reveal that film and literary media created new identities for women as both the creators and consumers of interwar movie culture, intervening in the way women saw and thought about themselves, and how they navigated the everyday experiences of modernity. Off to the Pictures thus presents a bold new view of interwar movie culture, read through the creative reflections of the women who experienced it.Lisa Stead is a Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the co-editor of The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (2013). Her essays on fandom, archives and women's cinema have appeared in Women's History Review and Transformative Works and Cultures, among other publications.Cover image: Cinema publicity programme: Regent Cinema, Brighton, week commencing 28 October 1923 / If winter comes. Courtesy of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.Cover design:[EUP logo]edinburghuniversitypress.comISBN 978-0-7486-9488-4Barcode