The Cultural Significance Of Cinematic Adaptations

Pride and Prejudice, one of Jane Austen's most well-known masterpieces, has ranked among the literary canon. Its popularity not only belongs to the nineteenth-century Great Britain, but is still a great hit in the world of the twenty-first century. It has been adapted to various versions of films and TV plays since 1940. Since the literary film study has been included into the field of literary criticism, 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. Applying the perspective of cultural studies, this paper attempts to transcend fidelity analysis to broaden the scope of adaptation study by examining the dialectics of text, audience and history. It acknowledges the significance of historical and sociological exploration of adaptation, which takes form at a specific moment in history, and the meaning or significance of an adaptation cannot be determined solely on aesthetic grounds. Literary film adaptation offers a multi-dimensional channel not only for the readers to appreciate and accept literary canons, but also for the literary canons to be passed down to the new generations. This thesis examines three typical cinematic adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, produced and consumed from 1940 to 2005 to approach literary film adaptation within specific historical and cultural contexts of its production and reception. Chapter One identifies the historical and cultural moments in the 1930s-1940s of the United States and examines the cultural strategies adopted by the MGM version to meet the challenging surroundings. Chapter Two takes the BBC version as a study case and explains the interaction between the film adaptation and the English classical culture. Chapter Three sets up the cultural context of the twenty-first century and discusses gains and losses of the representation of Pride and Prejudice by UNIVERSAL's adaptation. This thesis concludes that film adaptation is continually affected by and responsive to the social, industrial and cultural shifts, and the relation of the adaptations and the viewers of different historical periods is the key to explaining how their cultural meanings and functions are determined. Film adaptation is a site in which different texts open up a thousand entrances into a network of meanings, and through film adaptation, British classical novels are restored into the dynamic of texts, viewers and history.