Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom and Mary Sanders Pollock, and: Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company by Hila Shachar (review)

The title of Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation might indicate that this edited collection covers familiar ground for readers of this journal, but a glance at the table of contents indicates something a bit different. Here, we find two essays on adaptations from Jane Austen’s work and only one on Charles Dickens, an essay on an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short story but nothing on George Eliot or the Brontës. In a lucid introduction, Thomas M. Leitch makes the case, not just for continuing work on the relationship between cinema and the Victorian novel, but also for the changed emphasis in this collection. The aim of the editors and authors has been to “expand the canon and the image of Victorian fiction” (8). This means pushing at the historical boundaries of the Victorian period, varying the source texts to include drama and poetry as well as the novel, and paying greater attention to the sensationalist writers of the period such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Leitch illustrates the merits of this approach in the first essay of the collection, which presents four models of intertextual adaptation through an analysis of the many films which borrow, directly or indirectly, from Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

This expansion of the canon generally works well, although I was less convinced by the move to include discussion of the Austen adaptations. Since the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice, Austen has dominated the classic novel adaptation, and the works have received popular and critical attention. The shift to include poetry and drama was more unequivocally successful. Jean-Marie Lecomte’s essay, “The Poetics of Silent Film in Lubitsch’s Lady Windemere’s Fan,” illuminates the transformation of the dramatic text into a screen text and is both an exquisite piece of textual analysis and a considered contribution to debates about authorship. Mary Sanders Pollock offers an unexpected set of analogies in analyzing Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997) in terms of Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper” (1842) as well as Russell Banks’s novel on which the film was overtly based. The move toward the more sensational end of the Victorian spectrum is also successful in shifting the frameworks for analysis and, in doing so, forging productive links with film studies, where the ghosts and monsters of Victorian fiction have long been studied.

One welcome feature of this book is its awareness of the role of adaptations in teaching, whether in survey courses or more specialized classes; many of the essays here could be used productively in the classroom. Three essays in the section entitled “Teaching Books by Reading Movies” offer inspirational accounts of teaching adaptations using Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and the 1995 version of Persuasion to encourage students to engage critically and creatively with Victorian texts and their afterlives. It is a compliment to these teachers and their students (particularly those described in Sarah J. Heidt’s account of teaching Stoker’s Dracula [1897] in relation to its many film versions) that these essays offer interpretations and connections which are as compelling as those developed in the other two sections of the book. I did wonder, though, what these teachers would do with students who had neither the time, the experience, nor the willingness to engage with adaptations of so-called old books, and I would have welcomed a greater acknowledgement of the difficulties of engaging students in these books and films. Overall, though, this is a lively and engaging collection with much to offer Victorian studies.

Hila Shachar’s mongraph on the cultural...