Adapting Nineteenth-Century France

Adapting Nineteenth-Century France uses the output of six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to push for a re-conceptualisation 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 fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses re-workings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to underline the way in which such re-workings cast new light on many of their source texts and reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Moreover, Adapting Nineteeth-Century France traces their subsequent recreations in a comparable range of genres, encompassing key modern media of the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries: radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.

In this volume, key literary works are situated within a highly active network of diverse impulses that extend the critical focus beyond the usual concern of scholars - This major study attentively probes the multimedia and multifaceted dynamics of adaptation.' - Dr Bradley Stephens, School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol 'Griffiths and Watts break new ground in their invigorated intermedial exploration of the adaptive afterlives of leading nineteenth-century French novelists. This significant contribution traverses literary criticism, adaptation studies and media studies, bringing compelling insights, not least in the rarely studied areas of radio and television adaptation.'