Professor of Film and Media Studies Rob King has edited a special issue of Edinburgh Univserity Press's journal of Crime Fiction Studies. The collection of essays, titled Cornell Woolrich and Transmedia Noir, has been released as a book and is available for purchase here.
The collection explores the media networks of American pulp fiction through the lens of the "weird tales" that were a seedbed of noir—particularly, in this case, the works of famed mystery writer Cornell Woolrich. According to the publisher, "Tracking the transmedia circulation of Woolrich's stories and their various adaptations allows a rethinking of film noir as part of a broader 'noir mediascape' during this era."
The book represents the first scholarly collection of essays on Woolrich and also includes newly discovered, unpublished works by Woolrich himself. Many of the essays collected here grew out of the extensive panel discussions and presentations given by speakers at The Second Annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Noir Film Festival (also programmed by King) back in 2019.
Rob King is a film historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. His recent follow-up, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2017), challenges the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition. He has published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of anthologies and journals, and is the co-editor of three anthologies: Early Cinema and the “National” (John Libbey & Co., 2008), Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, 2010), and Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (John Libbey & Co., 2012). He is also working as co-editor of the Oxford University Press’s Oxford Handbook of Early Cinema, was published in 2019.
