Introduction
This book seeks to understand how the need to respond to film has become a constituent feature in the ongoing development of the novel. It suggests that such fascination with film played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel's respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and moral purpose, authors frequently turned their attention to film: a medium enviable not for the successes it achieved but for the lapses of taste it made obtrusive, and for the contradictions of address that it had the power to make attractive. In this impacted logic (and panic) of media transition, novelists came to credit narrative practices as yet undefined and unassimilated within literary tradition. In this, their texts respond to the felt devaluation of art in a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.