Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation By Abigail Burnham Bloo ...

that will undoubtedly make their own canonical opinions seem just as quaintly dated.

The ultimate goal of a collection of case studies like this, then, is not to present a new, improved, and definitive view of nineteenth-century English literature and literary culture but to remind one of the radical contingency of the culture that is so often proposed, for example, as an anchor or bulwark against the erosion of middle-class values in modern times. This contingency of both specific historical values and the literary tradition that has been created to enshrine them is nowhere better dramatized than in the classroom. Dennis Cutchins has recently contended that “studying literature via adaptations offers our students a better, more effective way to study literature. In fact, I would argue that studying literature through adaptations can teach students what we mean when we say ‘literature’ ” (87). The general tendency of the essays collected in this volume, as Laura Carroll puts it, “to destabilize the tendency to see either the novel or the film as fixed in its meanings, or as having a kind of documentary authority” (p. 226), is perhaps best demonstrated in the three concluding chapters, which are devoted specifically to teaching adaptations.

As Sarah J. Heidt expresses it in her chapter on Dracula and its multiple adaptations, a worthy goal for adaptation studies is to overturn the hierarchy that enshrines literature over film in the classroom by inviting students to see their own analyses as adaptations of texts whose claim to original status is everywhere challenged by their demand to be rewritten. Heidt’s experience teaching Stoker’s novel alongside its unauthorized silent adaptation Nosferatu (1922) “help[ed] students become savvier readers of novelistic and cinematic texts” (Heidt, p. 199) by using the strangeness and remoteness of silent-filming techniques such as color tinting as a gateway to understanding Stoker’s emphasis on “the textual nature of his characters’ experiences” (Heidt, p. 187). This emphasis is achieved in both the novel and its film adaptation through strikingly non-naturalistic means whose defamiliarizing force encouraged figurative readings. The reading and viewing experiences Heidt’s course produced