"One welcome feature of this book is its awareness of the role of adaptatations in teaching, whether in survey courses or more specialized classes, many of the essays here could be used productively in the classroom. ...This is a lively and engaging collection with much to offer Victorian studies." - Victorian Studies

"[The editors] chose film versions that if not literally faithful to the text of the Victorian novels at least manage to illuminate and augment their components. An impressive array of international scholars analyzes films extracted from works … The essays discuss 11 Victorian authors (those on Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, and Bram Stoker are particularly interesting); topics range from queer theory to intertextuality and film praxis. Highly recommended.” – CHOICE

Abigail Burnham Bloom is managing editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture; she teaches Victorian literature at Hunter College, CUNY, and The New School. Bloom recently published The Literary Monster on Film: Five Nineteenth-Century Novels and their Cinematic Adaptations and edited Personal Moments in the Lives of Victorian Women: Selections from their Autobiographies.

About Mary Sanders Pollock

Mary Sanders Pollock is the Nell Carlton professor of English at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. She teaches British literature, nature writing, and gender studies. She is the author of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership (2004) and coeditor, with Catherine Rainwater, of Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture (2005).

About the Contributors

Laura Carroll lectures in the English program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her main research project investigates ways that films adapted from novels accommodate and reconcile readers' competing experiences of the source works. Her other research interests include the afterlife of Jane Austen and post-Romantic fiction about animals. She has published essays on Austen adaptations, James Thurber, Shakespearean tragedy and Australian cinema.

Michael Eberle-Sinatra is an associate professor of English at the Université de Montréal. Prior to this appointment, he served as a research associate at the Northrop Frye Centre, University of Toronto. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Leigh Hunt and London Literary Scene, the founding editor of Romanticism on the Net, and the editor of Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Faulkner.

Sarah J. Heidt is an associate professor of English at Kenyon College, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature and culture, life-writing and autobiography, and film. In addition to ongoing book projects, she has published articles on Thomas and Jane Carlyle, John Addington Symonds, and the written and filmed versions of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Jean-Marie Lecomte is an associate professor at the University of Nancy, France. He specializes in the study of filmic speech and audio-visual semiotics. He has published essays on King Vidor’s cinema, the birth of the talking film, women's speech in early movies, and discourse in horror movies. His research centers on the interaction between verbal language and film language in silent and early talking movies.

Thomas Leitch is professor of English and director of film studies at the University of Delaware. His most recent books include Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ and A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, coedited with Leland Poague.

Louise McDonald is a senior lecturer in English and film studies at Newman University College in the West Midlands. Her teaching and research areas include American literature, and Victorian and early twentieth-century literature, and she leads courses in film theory and adaptation studies.

Ellen Moody teaches at George Mason University. She has published on the gothic, film, translations, nineteenth-century British novelists, and women’s memoirs. Moody has produced etext editions of works by Isabelle de Montolieu and Sophie Cottin, and her book, Trollope on the 'Net , combines research with her experiences leading discussions about Trollope in a listserv community. In addition, Moody has created a website dedicated to Austen and Trollope.

Gene M. Moore teaches English and American literature at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. His publications as author or editor include Proust and Musil: The Novel as Research Instrument, Conrad's Cities, Conrad on Film, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad, Faulkner's Indians, and a casebook on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He coedited the final two volumes of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, and his edition of Conrad’s last novel, Suspense, was published in 2011.

Natalie Neill teaches in the English department at York University. Her teaching and research areas include Romantic and Victorian literature, the gothic, and film adaptation. Neill has published on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, among other topics, and is editor of Love and Horror, a rare 1812 gothic parody. Another edition is forthcoming, and she is revising for publication an article on William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood.

Christopher Palmer has taught English literature and served as head of the English department at La Trobe University in Melbourne since 1977, with exchanges at Warwick University and the State University of California at Chico. He has published on Shakespeare, Umberto Eco, the practice of adaptation, and science fiction (on Mona Lisa Overdrive, “Big Dumb Objects,” China Mieville and Philip K. Dick--Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern).

Sue Thomas, professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is the author of The Worlding of Jean Rhys and Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre, co-author with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi of England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction, and compiler of Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952): A Bibliography. She has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, decolonizing literatures, and nineteenth-century periodicals.

Rebecca Waese teaches in the English department of La Trobe University. Her PhD, from York University, explores performative conventions and dramatic modes of representing postcolonial history in three Australian and Canadian novels. She is an honorary associate, lecturer and tutor at La Trobe University in Melbourne and has instructed drama to young people at The National Drama School in St. Kilda. She has led a film course in Hollywood Romance at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies; she has lectured on Canadian literature at York University and on film adaptation and re-situating modernism at La Trobe University. She has published on Allison Muri.

Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from Cambridge University and is an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her books include Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901 , Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890, and Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819-2004 , as well as edited collections on Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth-Century , Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers , and Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reframing the Victorians (Thomas Leitch)

Part I Reinterpreting the Victorians: Adaptation and the Techne of Revision

Chapter 1: Jekyll, Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde, Jekyll Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde: Four Models of Intertextuality (Thomas Leitch)

Chapter 2: The Poetics of Silent Film in Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (Jean-Marie Lecomte)

Chapter 3: Adapting Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in Prose (Natalie Neill)

Part II Modifying the Victorians: Adaptation and Shifts in Cultural Values

Chapter 4: The Power of Money: Browning’s “The Pied Piper” and Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (Mary Sanders Pollock)

Chapter 5: Making Private Scenes Public: Conrad’s “The Return” and Chéreau’s Gabrielle (Gene M. Moore)

Chapter 6: Totally Clueless: Heckerling and Queer Sexuality in Austen’s Emma (Michael Eberle-Sinatra)

Chapter 7: From Victorian to Postmodern Negation: Enlightenment Culture in Thackeray’s and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (Louise McDonald)

Chapter 8: Intertextuality in Simon Raven’s The Pallisers and Other Trollope Films (Ellen Moody)

Part III Translating the Victorians: Teaching Books by Reading Movies

Chapter 9: Teaching Stoker’s Dracula with Multiple Film Versions: Nosferatu, Dracula, and Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (Sarah J. Heidt)

Chapter 10: Transposing Sherlock Holmes across Time, Space, and Genre (Tamara S. Wagner)

Chapter 11: Austen’s and Michell’s Persuasion in the University Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies (Laura Carroll, Christopher Palmer, Sue Thomas, and Rebecca Waese)

Bibliography compiled by Abigail Burnham Bloom, Thomas Leitch, and Mary Sanders Pollock

Contributors

Index