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

(Michael Eberle-Sinatra’s reexamination of Emma in the light of Clueless and a discussion of the problems of teaching Persuasion and its 1995 film adaptation by Laura Carroll, Christopher Palmer, Sue Thomas, and Rebecca Waese) and one on a Conrad adaptation (Gene M. Moore’s analysis of Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle [2005] as an adaptation of Conrad’s story “The Return”).

Extending the period of Victorian fiction by pushing its temporal boundaries outward to include Austen, who died twenty years before Victoria ascended the throne, and Conrad, all of whose works through Lord Jim could be described as technically Victorian, is not the only way of enlarging the period’s scope. Several contributors expand Victorian fiction generically as including drama and poetry. Jean-Marie Lecomte considers the ways in which Ernst Lubitsch’s celebrated 1925 silent adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan uses cinematic devices to compensate for the lack of Oscar Wilde’s epigrammatic dialogue, not one line of which survives in Julien Josephson’s screenplay. Mary Sanders Pollock’s chapter on The Sweet Hereafter is still more adventurous in claiming Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film as a Victorian adaptation. She acknowledges that Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter provides the film’s primary source material. However, Pollock focuses on the ways in which the film is informed by Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin; A Child’s Story,” which one of the film’s main characters is repeatedly shown reading in the edition illustrated by Kate Greenaway. The effect is not only to enlarge Victorian fiction to include narrative poetry and illustration but to indicate the importance of sources that may be remote in time, place, and genre from the novel that is listed in the film’s credit sequence. In considering the sources on which the 1974 television miniseries The Pallisers draws, Ellen Moody casts an even wider net and discovers borrowings from several Trollope novels outside the Palliser sextet, along with echoes of George Meredith, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lord Byron, William Shakespeare, and the Bible.

A final aspect of this expansion is to redefine the nexus of Victorian fiction away from triple-decker social anatomies such as Dombey and