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

scholars to reconsider, reconceptualize, and reorder nineteenth-century studies. To begin with the simplest of these changes, this volume continues a tendency in recent collections to move away from organizing their contents according to the publication dates of the novels that are under adaptation. Although, as R. Barton Palmer points out, such a sequential organization “has the not inconsiderable virtue of offering literature teachers a familiar body of fiction with which to work” (4),it also inscribes those teachers as the primary audience for collections of essays on adaptation. And, by encouraging these teachers to approach adaptations in the publication sequence of their sources, it insinuates adaptations and adaptation study into historical period courses on literature as glosses on or posthumous complications in the reception of the sources themselves, which remain primary. This organizational principle, which assimilates adaptation study to literary history, persists in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo’s Literature and Film (2005). The most obvious alternative, organizing a collection of adaptation case studies according to the release dates of the adaptations, as Stam and Raengo do in A Companion to Literature and Film (2004), simply substitutes cinema history for literary history. The present collection, following a trail that was blazed by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text but is still decidedly under construction, is organized according to the broadly different approaches its contributors take toward the process of adaptation.

Reconsidering the fiction of the long Victorian period produces a new canon shaped by adaptation. It includes not simply the novelists who are beloved of survey courses (Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy), but also predecessors such as Austen and Mary Shelley, verse storytellers such as Browning, franchisers such as Conan Doyle, and monster-makers from Stevenson to Stoker. Clearly, these are not one’s grandmother’s Victorians. Such exercises in canon revision suggest that canons, whose very definition suggests eternal endurance, are always works in progress—the products of individuals and institutions that hope to