What seems obvious to me is that, around the time that film was emerging as an art form, the construction of prose fiction changed rather dramatically. The primary difference of most 20th Century literature from 19th Century and earlier literature is the filmic quality.

The Art of Adaptation

In the McLuhanian read, an adaptation is just the old medium being placed in the new medium wholesale. To an extent, this is true: all adaptations are going to have baggage from their original version. The number of people who declared that they would leave the theater if the sound effects of Wolverine’s claws in the first X-Men movie didn’t match the “snikt” noise used in the comics was mind boggling. Of course, that was stupid. Because “snikt” is a nonsense word and English orthography isn’t 1:1 – if you don’t believe me, just google “ghoti.”

A Thing Is as It Does: Notes Towards a Process Aesethetics

The art work is, however, an act – it is an action, performed by an artist, that persists through time, the medium of its transmission into the future as a vehicle for the artwork. They are the means by which it becomes accessible to other people, and the vector along which it travels through time.

"The Time Is Out of Joint": Notes on Metachrony

Humans generally look for patterns. It’s one of the things we’re good at, as a species: finding patterns in things, even when they’re not there. So it’s not particularly surprising that we look to the past to try to figure out what the fuck is going on: what is the pattern at work here?

Flavors of the Strange: On Weird Fiction and Further Affects

The past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.