Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Literature and Film is a cornucopia of vibrant essays that chart the history and confluence of literature and film. It explores in detail a wide and international spectrum of novels and adaptations, bringing together the very latest scholarship in the field.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. viii)
• Notes on Contributors (p. ix)
• Preface (p. xiii)
• Acknowledgments (p. xv)
• Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation (p. 1)
• 1 Improvements and Reparations at Mansfield Park (p. 53)
• 2 Keeping the Carcass in Motion: Adaptation and Transmutations of the National in The Last of the Mohicans (p. 71)
• 3 The Discreet Charm of the Leisure Class: Terence Davies's The House of Mirth (p. 86)
• 4 In Search of Adaptation: Proust and Film (p. 100)
• 5 The Grapes of Wrath: Thematic Emphasis through Visual Style (p. 111)
• 6 Cape Fear and Trembling: Familial Dread (p. 126)
• 7 The Carnival of Repression: German Left-wing Politics and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (p. 148)
• 8 Serial Time: Bluebeard in Stepford (p. 163)
• 9 Boyz N the Hood Chrontopes: Spike Lee, Richard Price, and the Changing Authorship of Clockers (p. 191)
• 10 Defusing The English Patient (p. 208)
• 11 Carnivals and Goldfish: History and Crisis in The Butcher Boy (p. 233)
• 12 Passion or Heartburn? The Uses of Humor in Esquivel's and Arau's Like Water for Chocolate (p. 252)
• 13 Beloved: The Adaptation of an American Slave Narrative (p. 272)
• 14 Oral Traditions, Literature, and Cinema in Africa (p. 295)
• 15 Memory and History in the Politics of Adaptation: Revisiting the Partition of India in Tamas (p. 313)
• 16 The Written Scene: Writers as Figures of Cinematic Redemption (p. 331)
• Index (p. 343)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

With these books, Stam (assisted by graduate student Allesandra Raengo) and numerous contributors offer a new take on adapting literature to film, with the clear intent of colonizing the field. The approach seems incomplete, however, since they ignore drama and Shakespeare. Literature through Film is the central volume of three (the intent of the other volumes is to fortify the first), and here Stam draws on his expertise in self-reflexive cinema. What irritates him and others is the common assumption that "the book was better" and that cinema does a disservice to literature, especially to Shakespeare and other classics. These same folks are offended by the recent discourse that seems to imply a moral failing on the part of cinema--language such as "infidelity," "betrayal," "violation," "bastardization," "desecration," "vulgarization." Stam is horrified by the way "adaptation discourse subtly reinscribes the axiomatic superiority of literature to film" and how notions of "anteriority and seniority" assume that "older arts are necessarily better." And Stam lists other sources of hostility: "dichotomous thinking," "iconophobia," "logophilia," and anti-corporeality; the myth of facility, which wrongly assumes that films are "easy to make" and "pleasurable to watch"; the class-based dichotomy that assumes that cinema vulgarizes and dumbs-down literature; and, finally, the "charge of parasitism," i.e., that adaptations suck the vitality out of their literary hosts (a bizarre notion that Stam calls "endemic"). If Stam's either/or contentions are true (which this reviewer doubts), no wonder cinema scholars feel slighted and inferior. The first volume having set the stage, Literature and Film looks at specific adaptations and examines issues of authorship, source texts, and bias. Though it also includes essays about specific adaptations, Companion to Literature and Film moves beyond specifics to "broader questions of transtextuality and intermediality." The superstars--Dudley Andrew, Charles Musser, Richard Allen, Tom Gunning, and other members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies--come out here, and they are determined to show why cinema should be just as valid as literature or drama. Kamilla Elliott calls into question the "word/image" duality; Andrew wonders whether historical films adapt "material in the same way as a film from a noted literary source does." Sometimes addicted to jargon, Stam et al. build a strong case against mono-dimensional fidelity discourse as the be-all and end-all of adaptation "theory," but finally they cannot deny that it is still a cornerstone that cannot be entirely ignored. Stam's understanding of cinema far surpasses that of Robin Smiley (Books into Film, 2003), but Sarah Cardwell's Adaptation Revisited (2002), which looks at television adaptations, and Kamilla Elliott's Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003) remain more serious recent contenders. Still this triptych cannot be dismissed or ignored, even if the positions advocated may be overstated in places. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels. J. M. Welsh Salisbury University