A multidimensional history: Film adaptation of British classic novels in America (Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Jane Austen)

This dissertation examines film adaptations of British classic novels produced and/or consumed in America from the 1930s to the 2000s. The study of literary film adaptation has long been limited in its scope by its preoccupation with fidelity analysis which focuses on comparing the adapted film and its source literature and determining how faithfully the film transposes narrative and thematic elements from the source. This work tries to transcend fidelity analysis to broaden the scope of adaptation study by examining the dialectics of texts, contexts and audience. It acknowledges the significance of historical and sociological exploration of adaptation: that adaptation happens at a specific moment in history and that the meaning or significance of an adaptation cannot be determined solely on aesthetic grounds. In order to understand literary film adaptation within specific historical and cultural contexts of its production and reception, this study identifies three moments when films adapted from British classic novels proliferated in America most observably---the 1930s, the 1980s and early 1990s and finally the mid 1990s up to now. Each historical moment is discussed in two parts---the first examining the historical and cultural contexts and setting up theoretical grounding and the second taking up specific cases for illustration. The examination of British classic adaptations from these different historical moments shows that literary film adaptation is a multi-dimensional process of transformation of an art from one historical period to another as well as from one medium to another, and from one nation to another. Adaptation is continually affected by, and responsive to, the social, industrial and cultural shifts. And most significantly, the relationship of the adaptations to the viewers of different historical periods is the key to explaining how their cultural meanings and functions are determined. The dissertation concludes that film adaptation is a site in which different texts open up a thousand entrances into a network of meanings and that through film adaptation, British classic novels are restored into the dynamic of texts, viewers, and history.