Screen Adaptations – serie

A close study of the relationship between text and film versions of Great Expectations. Literature and film studies students will find plenty of material to support their courses and essay writing on how the film versions provide different readings of the original text. Focussing on David Lean's film of Great Expectations, the book discusses: the literary text in its historical context, key themes and dominant readings of the text, how the text is adapted for screen and how adaptations have changed our reading of the original text. There are numerous excerpts from the literary text, screenplays and shooting scripts, with suggestions for comparison. The book also features quotations from authors, screenwriters, directors, critics and others linked with the chosen film and text.

Literature and film studies students will find plenty of material to support their courses and essay writing on how the film versions provide different readings of the original text. Focussing on numerous film versions, from Percy Stow's 1908 adaptation to Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, the book discusses: the literary text in its historical context, key themes and dominant readings of the text, how the text is adapted for screen and how adaptations have changed our reading of the original text. There are numerous excerpts from the literary text, screenplays and shooting scripts, with suggestions for comparison. The book also features quotations from authors, screenwriters, directors, critics and others linked with the chosen film and text.

The study of literature on screen is a growing area of study in schools and universities. Many students have to produce critical essays comparing the novel and film versions of a particular text. The Screen Adaptations series offers a wealth of study material: from the literary context of the original work, through to thought-provoking comparisons of the screen versions, critical commentary and the afterlife of the films. Pride and Prejudice is a classic piece of literature and any new adaptation is a major event. With several well-known TV and film versions available (featuring stars such as Keira Knightley) as well as a Bollywood version, discussions around how these films interpret the story, themes and characters is a popular classroom choice for students and teachers alike. This new title in the Screen Adaptations series, provides a rich source of material to help students understand and write about the reciprocal relationship between film and literature. It offers in-depth analysis of the various screen versions and alternative 'readings' as well as critical insight and an interview with writer Andrew Davies, best known for his 1995 BBC adaptation.Following from Shakespeare, Jane Austen on screen is now an established part of literary studies and the volume will conclude with a survey of the growing body of literature in the field.

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films’ socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare’s “words, words, words” into film’s particular grammar and rhetoric