The classic novel

From page to screen

Editors:
Robert Giddings
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Erica Sheen
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Film has been around now for over a hundred years, so it is surprising that the nature of its relationship to literature is still an open question. The transfer of an 'original' (literary) text from one context of production to an (audio-visual) other has begun to attract academic attention. The ideological investments at stake in this process reveal themselves in the central critical category of adaptation studies: the notion of 'fidelity', or 'faithfulness to the text'. This book takes the question of fidelity as their primary critical point of reference. As a critical term, fidelity behaves anomalously. Brian Mcfarlane has shown that there is no reliable equation between fidelity and critical approval, infidelity and disapproval. It is fascinating to see that Alison Platt and Ian MacKillop are interested in what it is about the experience of reading a classic novel that its adaptation restores to us. The book presents a group of essays loosely clustered around the English literary canon and ordered according to its chronology, not that of the films in question. The inference we might draw from the essays is not merely that 'English literature' remains a productive frame of reference for the study of film. It is also, perhaps, that the study of film might now derive more benefit from a treaty of union than a war of independence.

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