Abigail Burnham Bloom and Mary Sanders Pollock (eds.). Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-1604977868. Price: US$109.99/£65.99

Adaptation studies, by their nature, are perennially inexhaustible, with ever new adaptations inviting ever more criticism. While following in the wake of Dianne F. Sadoff’s Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen (2009), Abigail Burnham Bloom and Mary Sanders Pollock’s edited collection is by no means de trop, but rather the opposite. For while it is common for studies of film adaptations to treat at least one Victorian text or more, in-depth explorations of how a particular period’s literary productions are transposed onto screen remain comparatively rare. Yet exactly this kind of concentrated focus seems invaluable for exploring adaptation’s role as a form of doing history in an informative but popular fashion, simultaneously reinvigorating and commodifying our literary heritage. Leitch’s introduction comes closest to crystallizing the peculiar “continued fascination with the cultural capital [...] offered by nineteenth-century English literature and literary culture” (6). Leitch meditates on early film’s indebtedness to realism as well as our forebears’ penchant for visuality, spectacle and sensationalism, the latter credited with a crucial role “in defining the legacy of Victorian fiction” for cinema, adaptation theory, and wider culture (10). Add to this the iconic status of nineteenth-century authors—“so readily available to be fetishized” (7)—and adaptations of their texts mesh readily with (and benefit from an enhanced marketability within) today’s celebrity-driven culture. Leitch makes the provocative suggestion that rather than the literary canon determining filmmakers’ choices of texts to adapt, the process increasingly works in the opposite direction, resulting in “a new canon shaped by adaptation” (14)—though this might have been more persuasive if supported by a correspondingly wider coverage of lesser-known adapted Victorian texts in the collection. The volume’s opening essay (again by Leitch) analyzes multiple cinematic appropriations of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Leitch weighs the merits of four competing theoretical models—spoke/sunburst, genealogy, daisy chain, and tracer text—that can be used to explicate the complex intertexual relations and struggle for “supremacy” (42) between source texts and adaptations. Next, Jean-Marie Lecomte’s chapter on Ernst Lubitsch’s silent film Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) considers adaptation in terms of stylistic “reprocessing” and “semiotic and cultural metamorphosis” (52), not least involving a metaphorical un-lacing of Wilde’s supposedly more “straight-laced” (55) heroine via the ironic exploitation and sometime inversion of “both cinematic and theatrical codes” (56). Natalie Neill’s contribution on the adaptation history of A Christmas Carol (1843), Charles Dickens’ “most peddled, parodied, remade, and retailed” work (71) explores how early piracy and bowdlerization as an effect “of emergent mass culture” (72) fed adaptive practice in the post-Victorian age. Romanticizing and ritualizing adaptations, Neill argues, increasingly displace the source text in the cultural consciousness, underlining the impossibility of achieving textual and period fidelity as the source text becomes “just one of hundreds of versions” (80) in circulation. The second section is concerned with how adaptations can make visible latent aspects of Victorian texts, while engaging in complex ethical renegotiations that make them newly relevant. The editor Pollock’s perspicacious chapter deals with the “interpolation” (93) of Robert Browning’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1842) into Atom Egoyan’s 1997 adaptation of Russell Banks’s contemporary novel The Sweet Hereafter (1991). Pollock offers fine close readings of how various characters enact Browning’s Pied Piper role and of the traumatized community’s search for monetary recompense for the loss of their children in a tragic accident. The adaptation makes a scathing, if finally resigned, comment on our culture’s multifarious commodification of children while resisting, as does Browning’s poem, any reductive moral judgements. Gene M. Moore’s chapter discusses how Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle (2005) likewise complicates viewer responses in fleshing out the …