Adapting Nineteenth-Century France

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts