Literature and Film

Literature and Film is a superb collection of vibrant essays that chart the history and confluence of literature and film. Featuring an ambitious introductory essay tracing the theory and practice of adaptation, the volume explores in detail a wide and international spectrum of novels and adaptations. Subjects range from established classics like The Grapes of Wrath, The Last of the Mohicans, Mansfield Park, and Remembrance of Things Past, to consecrated genre works like Dracula and Cape Fear, to contemporary classics like The English Patient and Beloved. The analysis bears on individual films—such as Clockers and Like Water for Chocolate—and larger themes, like the depictions of writers in film, and orature in African cinema. Bringing together the very latest scholarship in the field, the Reader contains astute and readable essays, both theoretical and thematic, on the translation of literary into filmic texts. Almost all of the essays are originals, especially composed for this volume, and written by leading international scholars on both literature and film.
For the student or scholar, this volume provides an ideal way to become aware of the newest trends in film-literature studies, which go beyond issues of “fidelity,” to explore film/literature relations in all their multi-faceted intertextuality. It can be used as a stand-alone reference source, or alongside the textbook Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation by Robert Stam and Literature and Film, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, for a complete learning package in this dynamic field. As a whole, these three volumes will be shaping the debates about adaptation for the coming decades.

Author Biography

Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. His many books include Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (with Ella Shohat, 1994), and Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (1989). With Toby Miller, he is the editor of Film and Theory (Blackwell, 2000) and The Blackwell Companion to Film Theory (2000).

Alessandra Raengo is finishing her PhD in the Cinema Studies Department at New York University. Her dissertation explores race and vernacular social criticism in American culture between 1945 and 1968. Among her publications are The Birth of Film Genres (1999) and The Bounds of Representation (2000), both multilingual volumes edited with Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi.