Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama(Genre and Beyond: A Film Studies Series)

Going beyond the process of adaptation, Geraghty is more interested in the films themselves and how they draw on our sense of recall. While a film reflects its literary source, it also invites comparisons to our memories and associations with other versions of the original. For example, a viewer may watch the 2005 big-screen production of Pride and Prejudice and remember Austen's novel as well as the BBC's 1995 television movie. Adaptations also rely on the conventions of genre, editing, acting, and sound to engage our recall-elements that many movie critics tend to forget when focusing solely on faithfulness to the written word.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1 Narrative and Characterisation in Classic Adaptations: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Pride and Prejudice Chapter 3 2 Art Cinema, Authorship, and the Impossible Novel: Adaptations of Proust, Woolf, and Joyce Chapter 4 3 Tennessee Williams on Film: Space, Melodrama, and Stardom Chapter 5 4 Feminism, Authorship, and Genre: Adaptations of the Novels of Edna Ferber and Pearl S Buck Chapter 6 5 Revising the Western: Movement and Description in The Last of the Mohicans(1992) and Brokeback Mountain Chapter 7 6 Space, Setting, and Mobility in Old New York: The Heiress, The House of Mirth, and Gangs of New York Chapter 8 Conclusion Chapter 9 Filmography Chapter 10 Bibliography

About the Author :
Christine Geraghty is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She is the author of Women and Soap Opera (1991) and British Cinema in the Fifties (2000).

Review :
This wide-ranging, multifaceted, accessible discussion thoughtfully addresses many understudied aspects of screen adaptation. Geraghty covers a wide variety of works...demonstrating the flexibility and broad applicability of her innovative approach to film adaptation....This study provides a fresh perspective on film adaptation....Highly recommended. Christine Geraghty's book is...methodologically clear, lucid, and consistent on all levels....At all times Geraghty's discussions remain detailed and nuanced to boot. Christine Geraghty's book on the adaptation of literature into film comes like a breath of fresh critical air. She knows that the antecedent text can't be ignored, but she places the film in what may well be much more revealing contexts. Geraghty has not only chosen an imposing and unexpected range of literary texts and the films derived from them (from The Last of the Mohicans to Ulysses), but she also views them from new perspectives. Her emphasis is rewardingly on the films themselves and on their contexts: art-house cinema, the half-way house cinema of 'heritage filmmaking,' European independent film, or British New Wave. Adapted films, as Geraghty makes plain, will be read in radically different ways if the viewer has more in mind than a slavish concern for what has been 'done' to the earlier text. This is an important book, scholarly and stimulating and entirely readable.