List of Illustations. Preface. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. A Cervantic Prelude: From Don Quixote to Postmodernism. 2. Colonial and Postcolonial Classics: From Robinson Crusoe to Survivor. 3. The Self--Conscious Novel: From Henry Fielding to David Eggers. 4. The Proto--cinematic Novel: Metamorphoses of Madame Bovary. 5. Underground Man and Neurotic Narrators: From Dostoevsky to Nabakov. 6. Modernism, Adaptation, and the French New Wave. 7. Full Circle: From Cervantes to Magic Realism. Index

Translation theory advances thinking about film adaptation by enabling a more rigorous critical methodology. The relation between such second-order creations and their source materials is not communicative but hermeneutic, depending on the translator's or filmmaker's application of an interpretant. The hermeneutic relation can be seen not only as interpretive, fixing the form and meaning of the source materials, but as interrogative, exposing the cultural and social conditions of those materials and of the translation or adaptation that has processed them. The critic in turn applies an interpretant, whether a critical methodology or specific interpretation, to formulate the hermeneutic relation and its interrogative effects.

Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation

Adaptation, Translation, Critique

Investigating conceptualisations of the feminine creative imagination, this thesis examines representations of the Brontes and adaptations of their novels released between 1996 and 2011. I focus on portrayals of Charlotte and Anne Bronte alongside reworkings of Jane Eyre (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in various media. Contributing to existing research on the cultural afterlives of the Brontes and their novels, I position the works discussed within contemporary middlebrow culture whilst considering the influence of feminism.

The Introduction discusses the gendering of creative genius before identifying the tensions between critical, middlebrow and popular discourses’ conceptualisations of the Brontes’ imaginations. Thereafter, the first chapter proposes the contemporary usefulness and
considers the gendering of the concept of the middlebrow. I demonstrate that middlebrow culture is fascinated by the Brontes’ lives, art and feminine creative imaginations. To further this argument, the second chapter analyses neo-Victorian novels’ engagement with Charlotte
Bronte’s life, art and creativity. I illustrate that these works draw from second-wave feminist criticism on Jane Eyre and belong to a tradition of middlebrow feminine writing about the Brontes. The third chapter also examines representations of feminine creativity and discusses
how screen adaptations portray the artistry of Jane Eyre’s heroine. Additionally, the legacies of second-wave feminism in a wider postfeminist cultural context are explored. In the fourth chapter, the thesis turns to analyse the cultural dissemination and reputations of Anne Bronte
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I delineate how middlebrow culture has rediscovered the youngest Bronte, her novel and her feminism.

Ultimately, this thesis suggests that the works examined indicate middlebrow culture’s efforts to engage with feminism through the feminine creative imagination. Yet these works expose a prevailing tension in feminism between the status of the individual and the collective.

Reimagining the Brontës : (post)feminist middlebrow adaptations and representations of feminine creative genius, 1996-2011

In the period since 2001, cinema has witnessed what David Butler refers to as a ‘golden age’ of fantasy film production. The majority of fantasy films released during this time have originated from British literature, and have to some extent been produced and located within Britain, showcasing a wealth of national characters, acting talent, and landscapes on screen. Yet, despite vital revisionist work conducted on British horror, science fiction and melodrama, there remains a hesitancy to embrace fantasy as a genre intrinsically connected with national cinema and domestic film production values.
This thesis applies the contention that perceptions and understandings of British film and fantasy are influenced by the critical ‘writing machine’, which informs existing tensions between aesthetics, genre and film production, and also wider meanings attached to ideas around national identity and representation. However, this study argues that such discursive processes do not function as a homogenous entity and instead are prone to fluctuation across different critical sites and at different ‘moments’ in time. In order to determine how British cinema and fantasy genre are appropriated by the critical ‘writing machine’, this research adopts a historical reception studies approach to examine meanings and associations as generated by the contemporary British mainstream press in the subsequent decade since 2001 onwards.
Building on work conducted by Barbara Klinger and Kate Egan, amongst others, this thesis examines a broad range of critical materials, including press reviews and film-related articles, which circulated across a national, regional and local spectrum of mainstream distribution. This research contributes to existing scholarship by investigating how the critical ‘writing machine’ operates to inform and influence cultural appropriations of British cinema and fantasy genre, and considers how
these meanings can shift over time.

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A very British spectacle? : critical reception of the fantasy genre within contemporary British cinema

Children in Frank Beyer's Holocaust Films

After a short survey of the key questions regarding intermediality in cinema and placing them into the context of current debates in media studies and film theory, the paper addresses the key issues of the methodology of studying intermediality in film. In assessing the import of intermedial studies on film, the paper focuses on certain characteristic methodologies that have emerged in treating intermedial occurrences within films throughout the history of theorizing about the movies in general. Some of the major historical paradigms to be briefly described are: the normative aesthetic viewpoints in the spirit of cinematic New Laocoons, the trans-medial theorizing of the moving image, inter-art theories, and parallax historiographies. Finally methodologies aiming at modelling intermediality and mapping the rhetoric of intermedial cinema are presented in somewhat more detail.

/pdf/intermediality-in-film-a-historiography-of-methodologies-xsqx7yth5c.pdf

Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation

Citations

Adaptation, Translation, Critique

Reimagining the Brontës : (post)feminist middlebrow adaptations and representations of feminine creative genius, 1996-2011

A very British spectacle? : critical reception of the fantasy genre within contemporary British cinema

Children in Frank Beyer's Holocaust Films

Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies

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