Film Studies

`It wasn't as good as the book' - this is the response to many a film adaptation, and even the starting point of many film reviews. Novel into Film is the first sytematic theoretical account of the process by which the great (and not so great) works of literature are transformed into the good, bad (sometimes ugly) but always distinctive medium of cinema. Drawing upon recent relevant literay and film theory, the book provides careful analysis of the theory and practice of metamorphosis. The Scarlet Letter, Random Harvest, Great Expectations, Daisy Miller and Cape Fear provide case studies which represent a range of fiction and cinematic practice.

Adaptations considers the theoretical and practical difficulties surrounding the translation of a text into film, and the reverse process; the novelisation of films. Through three sets of case studies, the contributors examine the key debates surrounding adaptations: whether screen versions of literary classics can be faithful to the text; if something as capsulated as Jane Austens irony can even be captured on film; whether costume dramas always of their own time and do adaptations remake their parent text to reflect contemporary ideas and concerns. Tracing the complex alterations which texts experience between different media, Adaptations is a unique exploration of the relationship between text and film.

Authoring a film adaptation of a literary source not only requires a media conversion but also a transformation as a result of the differing dramatic demands of cinema. The most critical central step in this transformation of a literary source to the screen is the writing of the screenplay. The screenplay usually serves to recruit producers, director, and actors; to attract capital investment; and to give focus to the conception and production of the film project. Often undergoing multiple revisions prior to production, the screenplay represents the crucial decisions of writer and director that will determine how and to what end the film will imitate or depart from its original source.Authorship in Film Adaptation is an accessible, provocative text that opens up new areas of discussion on the central process of adaptation surrounding the screenplay and screenwriter-director collaboration.

This is the first major collection of essays specifically to address the impact of visual technologies on the production of literature in the twentieth-century. Literature and Visual Technologies investigates the manifold effects which a visual century has wrought upon literary conventions. From the influence of Mutoscope parlours on Joyce's fiction, to the interrelation between Peter Greenaway's A TV Dante , the collection consists of an integrated series of high-level intellectual engagements with a hundred years of cultural revolution, and covers the whole twentieth-century, from silent to digital film.

This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered to be written by a single author. Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of how an author produces a work is often more complex than is expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius. The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of authorial achievement.

After decades of neglect, the screenplay is finally being recognized as a form that deserves serious critical analysis. This book for the first time combines detailed study of the theory and practice of screenwriting with new approaches to criticism and original studies of individual texts.