Film adaptation and its discontents

About this book

"Unlike most books on film adaptation - which often focus on a series of close one-to-one comparisons between specific films and canonical novels - this volume identifies and investigates a far wider array of problems posed by the process of moving from text to screen." "Beginning with an examination of why adaptation study has so often supported the institution of literature rather than fostering the practice of literacy, Thomas Leitch considers how the creators of short silent films attempted to give them the weight of literature, what sorts of fidelity are possible in an adaptation of sacred scripture, what it means for an adaptation to pose as an introduction to, rather than a transcription of, a literary classic, and why and how some films have sought impossibly close fidelity to their sources."--Jacket.