With thirty-four original chapters from three dozen top scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema provides a thoughtful and provocative re-examination of a medium that would become the dominant form of mass entertainment by the second decade of the twentieth century. The volume is arranged around a series of broad topics: the "invention" of cinema as both technology and medium; the intermedial development of film aesthetics and genres; nontheatrical and non-commercial uses of cinema; the political economy of Hollywood mass culture; film and global modernities; and silent cinema's publics and counter-publics.

The historiographical essays in this collection engage with the question of how we might rethink silent film history, especially in the context of the developed media ecosystem that defined the early 1900s. Influenced by methodologies as diverse as media archaeology and industrial studies, and sensitive to both the textual contours of silent films and the cultural, economic, and ideological currents that helped shape them, the Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema invites its reader to envision its object in expansive terms that incorporate the propulsive energy of the first decades of the 1900s and deploy the analytical frameworks of the current day.