About the Book:

The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen critically examines the long established tradition of adapting classic novels to film or TV screen.

Editors Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen present a wide-ranging but focused collection of essays on cinema and television adaptations that is free of media jargon and looks at both the film and the book. Includes discussion of: The English Patient, Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, Pickwick Papers, Dracula, Dickens, Conrad, Hardy and Waugh. The early cinema ransacked literature for stories suitable for retelling in moving pictures, and as the art of the cinema matured, and cinematography, music, special effects and sound were improved, the art of dramatization began to produce high quality versions of respected novels. The authors in The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen analyze a wide variety of literary dramatizations.

About the Authors:

Robert Giddings (1935-2012) was Professor Emeritus in Communication and Culture at the School of Media Arts and Communication, Bournemouth University. He lived, taught, wrote and argued from a wheelchair, having been disabled by polio as a child. He produced 20 books, alone or in collaboration, and wrote extensively about film and TV adaptations and applauded whatever conveyed literature to the general public.

Erica Sheen is Lecturer in English Literature, Film and Literary Theory at the University of Sheffield. She teaches and researches in the Renaissance and in cinema, especially American and European cinemas in the Cold War.