David Seed's Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to the Second World War begins with a question: “given their fascination with the new medium of film, did American novelists attempt to apply cinematic methods in their own writings?” (1). That they did is not up for debate. What this book does is analyse how much, how often and in what ways American writers were influenced by or used cinematic techniques.

Analyses of the relationship between early cinema and (early) twentieth-century literature have been forthcoming in recent years. Much of this scholarship has focussed on high modernist authors. The contribution of Seed's book is its focus on and examination of the specific relationship between American literature and American (Hollywood) cinema, as well as the inclusion of popular and middlebrow novels. The main difference of approach between this book and others in this area is that Seed sees the relationship as one of interchange, rather than as a convergent aesthetic (as Garrett Stewart and David Trotter do) – as Seed notes, many American writers not only wrote about cinema in their novels and in nonfiction, but they also wrote screenplays and scenarios for Hollywood (not always successfully). As such, Seed uses letters, diaries and other archival research to map the authors' relationships with and thoughts on both Hollywood as an industry and film as a new form of art.

The book does not offer a theoretical intervention into the debates about how we might define “cinematic fiction.” Still, in the textual analyses, Seed does show how the writers' uses of the gaze, framing and space have been influenced and shaped by filmic techniques. Evidenced by its title, the book covers a considerable swathe of historical ground, beginning at the turn of the century with a chapter on Stephen Crane, Henry James and Edith Wharton and finishing in 1939 with Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust. In between are chapters on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Theodor Dreiser, John Steinbeck and Henry Miller. In each of these chapters, additional writers of the same period are included: James M. Cain, Upton Sinclair, Edward Dahlberg, Anaïs Nin and Carl Van Vechten. Chapter 11 focusses on African American writers, situating works by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Oscar Micheaux in the context of the ongoing racism of mainstream cinema established by The Birth of a Nation.

What is most compelling in this particular chapter is Seed's examination of Micheaux's defense of realism within the debates about representation and the pressure on African American filmmakers to offer “positive” representations of blacks. Micheaux also stands out here for being the only figure in the book who was both a novelist and a filmmaker. The book's breadth may be one of its strengths, but it is also a weakness – the space given to individual novels and films is necessarily brief. Still, this book sets valuable groundwork for much-needed future scholarship that moves beyond high (English) modernism and expands the early history of the interrelationship between literature and film.