Karen Laird’s book The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1849–1920 will be published in August 2015 by Ashgate Press. Follow her latest updates on Twitter @drkarenlaird. Far from the Madding Crowd was first adapted for film in 1915 by the British studio Turner Pictures. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic saw it as a lukewarm effort save for the lead performance by Florence Turner (known early in her phenomenal career as simply “The Vitagraph Girl”). One critic praised Turner’s
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What We Know about What Maisie Knew: A Critical Conversation
By Ryan D. Fong, Kalamazoo College, & Victoria Ford Smith, University of Connecticut The following conversation took place via e-mail in July and August 2013, after we each viewed the most recent film adaptation of Henry James’s 1897 novel, What Maisie Knew. In the collaborative spirit of the film’s directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, we decided to write a joint review, analyzing the film from our respective areas of expertise. What Maisie Knew is still playing in select theatres,
Read moreAvoiding those Madding Crowds: Date Night with Thomas Hardy
Ryan D. Fong Kalamazoo College For most of our readership across the United States and in the UK, April is proving to be a very cruel month indeed—with severe weather patterns and cold fronts marching across the North America and Atlantic. In these frigid days and dank nights, in which we grow ever wearier of these lingering and intemperate climes, what is a good Victorianist to do? The options would seem (at least to this Victorianist) to either sink into
Read moreFilm Review of ‘Django: Unchained’ (2013)
by Tom Steward Django: Unchained, the latest film from director Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill), is jointly a western and Southern melodrama delivered in the Blaxploitation and Spaghetti Western traditions dealing with slaveholding in a pre-Civil War American South. The director’s intervention into nineteenth-century African-American historiography in such a fashion was potentially problematic. Tarantino’s only previous attempt at historical filmmaking had been the counterfactual World War Two film Inglorious Basterds and both the western and Southern melodrama are film
Read moreLes Misérables: Or, When Will Someone Set The Industrial Revolution To Song?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmvHzCLP6ug[/youtube] With today’s nationwide release of Les Misérables I booked my ticket and hurried off to my local cinema, excited to catch ‘The Best Film Of The Year’ – which is high praise indeed as it is only January. The film adaptation of the world’s longest running musical has a lot to live up to: a dedicated fan base more judgmental than any twihard, and reputation for having attracted some of the biggest names of stage and screen to its
Read moreA Conversational Review: Great Expectations 2012, dir. Mike Newell
by Emma Curry (Birckbeck, University of London) and Beatrice Bazell (Birckbeck, University of London) Emma Curry (EC): Arriving less than a year after the BBC’s highly-acclaimed Christmas TV adaptation of Great Expectations was always going to be a problem for Mike Newell’s new version of Dickens’s masterpiece, starring Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Jeremy Irvine as Pip. Adaptations don’t usually need to justify themselves, but in much of the press surrounding this film it seemed the writer, actors and director
Read moreMen, Sex, and a Selfish Giant – Review of Wilde (1997)
by Fern Riddell, (King’s College, London) [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7NGglgjCU[/youtube] “You shocked them. But the more frivolous you seem, the more serious you are, aren’t you?” -Bosie to Oscar Wilde Now, Oscar Wilde has been a love of mine since I read ‘A Picture of Dorian Grey’ during my A Levels. His style of writing, and his observations on the frailty of human interaction, is so delicate in its understanding that it will always be timeless. Wilde has often divided critics; there are those
Read moreVibrators, the New Women and One Naughty Queen: Film Review of ‘Hysteria’
by Fern Riddell (King’s College, London) Since 2011, I have waited with bated breath for the release of Tanya Wexler’s new film Hysteria, which stars Rupert Everret as a sexually deviant, technologically gifted billionaire playboy – the Victorian Bruce Wayne of the sex aid industry – Maggie Gyllenhaal as a feisty, do-gooding, chest-beating early suffragette, and Hugh Dancy as a young, forward-thinking, if not always forward-looking, doctor with a great idea. With brilliant support from Jonathan Pryce, Felicity Jones, and
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