“Written with the Movies in Mind”: Twentieth-Century American Literature and Transmedial Possibility

Abstract

Abstract In the early 1910s the extension of copyright protection to moving-picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, altering the economic and institutional constitution of the American literary field. In letters, industry documents, and journalistic articles, authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for adaptation. The capacity of authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works at the moment of composition may be called the “transmedial possibility” of fiction. Transmedial possibility, the theoretical complement to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of remediation, inflected the form of several works of the 1920s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.