Rethinking The Novel Film Debate

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The relationship between books & film is a key topic of cinema studies. Much of this criticism, however, has been inherited from 18th-century debates on poetry & painting & thus has fostered false & limiting paradigms in which words & pictures are opposed. This text historicizes & critiques the central paradigms of this debate.

Most books on film adaptation—the relation between films and their literary sources—focus on a series of close one-to-one comparisons between specific films and canonical novels. This volume identifies and investigates a far wider array of problems posed by the process of adaptation. Beginning with an examination of why adaptation study has so often supported the institution of literature rather than fostering the practice of literacy, Thomas Leitch considers how the creators of short silent films attempted to give them the weight of literature, what sorts of fidelity are possible in an adaptation of sacred scripture, what it means for an adaptation to pose as an introduction to, rather than a transcription of, a literary classic, and why and how some films have sought impossibly close fidelity to their sources. After examining the surprisingly divergent fidelity claims made by three different kinds of canonical adaptations, Leitch's analysis moves beyond literary sources to consider why a small number of adapters have risen to the status of auteurs and how illustrated books, comic strips, video games, and true stories have been adapted to the screen. The range of films studied, from silent Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes to The Lord of the Rings, is as broad as the problems that come under review.

“Hamlet” by Olivier, Kaurismäki or Shepard and “Pride and Prejudice” in its many adaptations show the virulence of these texts and the importance of aesthetic recycling for the formation of cultural identity and diversity. Adaptation has always been a standard literary and cultural strategy, and can be regarded as the dominant means of production in the cultural industries today. Focusing on a variety of aspects such as artistic strategies and genre, but also marketing and cultural politics, this volume takes a critical look at ways of adapting and appropriating cultural texts across epochs and cultures in literature, film and the arts.

A collection of essays covering many different aspects of literature on screen.

Textual Revisions is a collection of new essays which discusses adaptations for cinema and television of a variety of novels, plays and short stories. Works discussed include adaptations of novels by Austen, Stoker, Michael Cunningham, Fowles and Tolkien, plays by Shakespeare and Pinter, and a short story by Philip K. Dick. Contents: The Materialisation of the Austen World: Film Adaptations of Jane Austen's Novels, by Deborah Wynne; The Amazing Cinematograph: Cinema and Illusion in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, by Paul Foster; Modernist Writing, the Cinematic Image and Time, by Deniz Baker; From Image to Frame: The Filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman, by William Stephenson; The Rain It Raineth in Every Frame: A Defence of Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, by Graham Atkin; The Film of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, by Ashley Chantler; Can You See?: Spielberg's Screen Adaptation of Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report, by Brian Baker; Refracted Light: Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, by Chris Walsh

This collection of forty new essays, written by the leading scholars in adaptation studies and distinguished contributors from outside the field, is the most comprehensive volume on adaptation ever published. Written to appeal alike to specialists in adaptation, scholars in allied fields, and general readers, it hearkens back to the foundations of adaptation studies a century and more ago, surveys its ferment of activity over the past twenty years, and looks forward to the future. It considers the very different problems in adapting the classics, from the Bible to Frankenstein to Philip Roth, and the commons, from online mashups and remixes to adult movies. It surveys a dizzying range of adaptations around the world, from Latin American telenovelas to Czech cinema, from Hong Kong comics to Classics Illustrated, from Bollywood to zombies, and explores the ways media as different as radio, opera, popular song, and videogames have handled adaptation. Going still further, it examines the relations between adaptation and such intertextual practices as translation, illustration, prequels, sequels, remakes, intermediality, and transmediality. The volume's contributors consider the similarities and differences between adaptation and history, adaptation and performance, adaptation and revision, and textual and biological adaptation, casting an appreciative but critical eye on the theory and practice of adaptation scholars--and, occasionally, each other. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies offers specific suggestions for how to read, teach, create, and write about adaptations in order to prepare for a world in which adaptation, already ubiquitous, is likely to become ever more important.

Rather than limiting the cinema, as certain French New Wave critics feared, adaptation has encouraged new inspiration to explore the possibilities of the intersection of text and film. This collection of essays covers various aspects of adaptation studies--questions of genre and myth, race and gender, readaptation, and pedagogical and practical approaches.