Adapting Nineteenth-Century France

This book focuses on adaptations in and of nineteenth-century France, assessing the reworking of Emile Zola in radio, Honore de Balzac in silent cinema, Gustave Flaubert in contemporary fiction, Victor Hugo in musical theatre, Guy de Maupassant in television and Jules Verne in sound film.

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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.

Contents

Introduction, Kate Griffiths
I Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate Griffiths
II Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew Watts
III Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew Watts
IV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew Watts
V Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate Griffiths
VI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate Griffiths
Conclusion, Andrew Watts