Overview
- Brings literature/film adaptation to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age
- Demonstrates that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a way to engage with the baggage of ideological heritage in our contemporary global media environment
- Analyses how a twentieth- or twenty-first-century film adaptation confronts, remediates, and reappropriates the progress ideology—but also the subversive possibilities—inherent in Romantic and Victorian British fiction
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About this book
This book brings film adaptation of literature to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior “master race” to “uplift” its colonized populations—morally, socially, and economically. This book argues that, on the one hand, film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels reveal the arrogance and coercive intentions that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity—improvement’s post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the book also argues that the films use their nineteenth-century source texts to criticize these same legacies of imperialism. By bringing together film adaptation, postcolonial theory, and literary studies, the book demonstrates that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a way to engage with the baggage of ideological heritage in our contemporary global media environment.
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Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Vivian Y. Kao is Assistant Professor of Composition in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication at Lawrence Technological University, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel
Authors: Vivian Y. Kao
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54580-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-54579-6Published: 02 October 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-54582-6Published: 03 October 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-54580-2Published: 01 October 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 252
Topics: Adaptation Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Film History, American Cinema and TV, British Cinema and TV