This article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming's James Bond n... more This article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. In particular, it examines how the author uses Bond's culinary knowledge and habits of consumption as an important constituent of his hero's character. Similarly, the food choices of other characters, notably villains, are shown to be linked, by Fleming, to core aspects of their identity − principally their ethnicity. Bond's impulse to observe and classify, very much in evidence in the novels' food sequences, is examined in terms of the texts' construction of Bond as a skilled identifier of signs.
This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol's novel L'eau des collines (comprising Jean de Florette and M... more This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol's novel L'eau des collines (comprising Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources: 1962) and their film adaptations (Dir. Claude Berri, 1986). It places particular emphasis on the construction of the adaptations as a major French cultural event and as constitutive of what would come to be termed 'heritage cinema'. The role of the films-in particular their lush cinematography and representation of the Provencal countryside-in the subsequent explosion of tourist interest and second-home ownership in Provence will also be discussed. Drawing on texts as diverse as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence (1989) and the critical literature of Travel and Tourism Studies, the chapter examines the role of books and their screen adaptations in shaping attitudes to places and people.
With the exception of Shakespeare, few English writers have a greater claim to canonical status t... more With the exception of Shakespeare, few English writers have a greater claim to canonical status than Jane Austen. Always in print, frequently adapted, taught, studied, and referenced she is widely understood as a 'national treasure' of Britain’s literary heritage, and one of the most prominent features of our cultural landscape. Of her six published novels, Pride and Prejudice (1813) is undoubtedly the best known. Even for those who have not read the original, the essentials of its characters and story are often familiar through film and television adaptations as well as through other texts – Bridget Jones' Diary (1996, adapted 2001) for example – that use the novel as a foundation for their own narratives. This chapter considers three recent novels that re-work Pride and Prejudice in very different ways. Jo Baker's Longbourn (2013) imagines events as seen from the perspective of the servants, constructing a parallel narrative for those figures who are only briefly g...
This paper is concerned with the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and w... more This paper is concerned with the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and with the book – or more accurately – books from which it is adapted. The film’s source material comes from novelist Patrick O’Brian who, between 1969 and his death in 2000, wrote 20 completed novels, plus one unfinished work. While no single text manifests a glaring temporal anomaly, taken as a whole it is apparent that numerous factors including the age of characters, aspects of their backstory, and especially the cumulative duration of several epic sea journeys do not cohere. It is not the object of this paper to treat this distortion as a failure. Rather, it is to focus on how the single screen adaptation engages with this aspect of its literary predecessors.
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visu... more This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.
Set in the Royal Navy of the early Nineteenth Century, Patrick O’Brian’s twenty one historical no... more Set in the Royal Navy of the early Nineteenth Century, Patrick O’Brian’s twenty one historical novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin have countless connections with the life and work of Sir Joseph Banks, the famous botanist and naturalist. Maturin, a physician and secret intelligence agent, is also devoted to natural history, using their many shared journeys to document the fauna of numerous countries; though the rigours of naval life (not to mention the structural imperatives of the historical novel) frequently demand that he abandon his observations so the ship may hurry on. Both Aubrey and Maturin are Fellows and, opportunity permitting, attendees at the Royal Society of which Banks was President. Navigation, mapping, astronomy, the furtherance of trade and empire, scholarly exchange between England and France during the Napoleonic Wars, relations between the Navy and the East India Company, colonies (penal and otherwise), and the passion for creatin...
This paper centres on a key scene in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) in which Jude and... more This paper centres on a key scene in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) in which Jude and his first wife, Arabella, kill their pig. This scene will be considered in terms of key aspects of Hardy's writing and of how the author and his novels have been received by readers and critics. Questions of realism--notably the extent to which Hardy may be said to both practice and resist that mode--will form a principal stand of the survey, as well as consideration of the author's relationship to such interpretive categories as melodrama, sensation, and satire.
This article arises from a 2011 interview with producer Andy Harries. Earlier that year the BBC h... more This article arises from a 2011 interview with producer Andy Harries. Earlier that year the BBC had aired three ninety-minute adaptations of the detective novels by Michael Dibdin featuring the character Aurelio Zen. The interview and subsequent article focus on the process by which the novels were chosen, the intended audience, casting, international co-financing, changes between page and screen, and the adaptations’ relationship to other texts notably Wallander also produced by Harries.
This essay outlines the key features of a narrative formula that I have termed elsewhere the ‘tea... more This essay outlines the key features of a narrative formula that I have termed elsewhere the ‘team film’ (see Strong 2006, 2008). In particular it addresses aspects of dialogue that enact the motifs of the team film; though the formula is constituted not only in what is said but in visual, structural and other dimensions of the texts under consideration.
This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol’s L’eau des collines and its film adaptations Jean de Florett... more This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol’s L’eau des collines and its film adaptations Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (Dir. Claude Berri, 1986). Methodologically, its principal innovation in revisiting these films is an engagement with theories from the critical literature of Travel and Tourism Studies to elucidate the desire of readers and viewers to visit places associated with cherished texts. The films’ role in the subsequent explosion of tourist interest and second-home ownership in Provence is discussed in terms of the proposed concept of ‘adaptation tourism’, and the sometimes fraught relationship between incomers and locals is framed as analogous to the key themes of Pagnol’s story. Combining tourism-oriented analyses with ideas drawn from critiques of heritage film, Provence is examined as a ‘cultural landscape’, its meanings constructed in part by books and screen texts and its ownership – both literal and interpretive – contested across fault-lines of belonging.
Art,” from e Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares comically des... more Art,” from e Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares comically describe a ctional article in which the category of “insipid” is listed as one of the four basic tastes, sweetness being discovered later! 2. Len Deighton, abc of French Food (New York: Bantam, 1989),
The mini-series Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond, which aired in the U.S. on BBC America and in... more The mini-series Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond, which aired in the U.S. on BBC America and in the U.K. on Sky Atlantic in 2014, offered an entertaining and glamorised account of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Focusing in particular on Fleming’s time during the Second World War, a period in which he served in British Naval Intelligence, successive episodes comprised embroidered accounts of his experiences, with a heavy emphasis on scenes and motifs that chimed with the doings of his most famous character. This approach to the author’s life-story foregrounded the same elements upon which previous small-screen biographies of Ian Fleming had focused, especially his creation of Bond. The TV film Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1989) addressed his wartime experiences and subsequent Bond writing, while Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1990) doubled down on its Bond connections by casting Jason Connery (son of original film 007, Sean Connery) as Fleming in a Second World War adventure with numerous James Bond parallels. Likewise, Ian Fleming: Bondmaker (2005) and Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began (2008) both framed Fleming first and foremost in terms of his literary creation. With high production values, and a strong cast that included Dominic Cooper, Lara Pulver, and Samuel West, Fleming bore several of the hallmarks of what has come to be called “quality television” (Thompson, 1997) , and was heavily promoted in the weeks running up to its broadcast. However, a contemporary review in Wired by Graeme McMillan saw it as evidence of a problematic tendency in recent biopics. McMillan asserted that while such texts were previously “a mix of entertainment, education and guilt-free voyeurism,” they have become “a contradictory mix of hagiography and revisionism, lionizing their subjects while somehow managing to diminish them in comparison to the products of their imagination” (McMillan, 2014). In this chapter I will look to unpick this contention, and—in particular—to approach Fleming and the author biopic in terms of adaptation.
This article contends that the final two novels of Thomas Hardy, "Tess of the d'Urbervil... more This article contends that the final two novels of Thomas Hardy, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and "Jude the Obscure," are subject to a variety of different readings. Both novels appear to have affiliations to a range of literary genres and modes, most of which are eschewed by their adaptations. The work of Hardy was considered to suffer from a variety of faults, including his attraction to melodrama and his reliance on coincidence.
This article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming's James Bond n... more This article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. In particular, it examines how the author uses Bond's culinary knowledge and habits of consumption as an important constituent of his hero's character. Similarly, the food choices of other characters, notably villains, are shown to be linked, by Fleming, to core aspects of their identity − principally their ethnicity. Bond's impulse to observe and classify, very much in evidence in the novels' food sequences, is examined in terms of the texts' construction of Bond as a skilled identifier of signs.
This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol's novel L'eau des collines (comprising Jean de Florette and M... more This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol's novel L'eau des collines (comprising Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources: 1962) and their film adaptations (Dir. Claude Berri, 1986). It places particular emphasis on the construction of the adaptations as a major French cultural event and as constitutive of what would come to be termed 'heritage cinema'. The role of the films-in particular their lush cinematography and representation of the Provencal countryside-in the subsequent explosion of tourist interest and second-home ownership in Provence will also be discussed. Drawing on texts as diverse as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence (1989) and the critical literature of Travel and Tourism Studies, the chapter examines the role of books and their screen adaptations in shaping attitudes to places and people.
With the exception of Shakespeare, few English writers have a greater claim to canonical status t... more With the exception of Shakespeare, few English writers have a greater claim to canonical status than Jane Austen. Always in print, frequently adapted, taught, studied, and referenced she is widely understood as a 'national treasure' of Britain’s literary heritage, and one of the most prominent features of our cultural landscape. Of her six published novels, Pride and Prejudice (1813) is undoubtedly the best known. Even for those who have not read the original, the essentials of its characters and story are often familiar through film and television adaptations as well as through other texts – Bridget Jones' Diary (1996, adapted 2001) for example – that use the novel as a foundation for their own narratives. This chapter considers three recent novels that re-work Pride and Prejudice in very different ways. Jo Baker's Longbourn (2013) imagines events as seen from the perspective of the servants, constructing a parallel narrative for those figures who are only briefly g...
This paper is concerned with the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and w... more This paper is concerned with the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and with the book – or more accurately – books from which it is adapted. The film’s source material comes from novelist Patrick O’Brian who, between 1969 and his death in 2000, wrote 20 completed novels, plus one unfinished work. While no single text manifests a glaring temporal anomaly, taken as a whole it is apparent that numerous factors including the age of characters, aspects of their backstory, and especially the cumulative duration of several epic sea journeys do not cohere. It is not the object of this paper to treat this distortion as a failure. Rather, it is to focus on how the single screen adaptation engages with this aspect of its literary predecessors.
This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visu... more This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.
Set in the Royal Navy of the early Nineteenth Century, Patrick O’Brian’s twenty one historical no... more Set in the Royal Navy of the early Nineteenth Century, Patrick O’Brian’s twenty one historical novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin have countless connections with the life and work of Sir Joseph Banks, the famous botanist and naturalist. Maturin, a physician and secret intelligence agent, is also devoted to natural history, using their many shared journeys to document the fauna of numerous countries; though the rigours of naval life (not to mention the structural imperatives of the historical novel) frequently demand that he abandon his observations so the ship may hurry on. Both Aubrey and Maturin are Fellows and, opportunity permitting, attendees at the Royal Society of which Banks was President. Navigation, mapping, astronomy, the furtherance of trade and empire, scholarly exchange between England and France during the Napoleonic Wars, relations between the Navy and the East India Company, colonies (penal and otherwise), and the passion for creatin...
This paper centres on a key scene in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) in which Jude and... more This paper centres on a key scene in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) in which Jude and his first wife, Arabella, kill their pig. This scene will be considered in terms of key aspects of Hardy's writing and of how the author and his novels have been received by readers and critics. Questions of realism--notably the extent to which Hardy may be said to both practice and resist that mode--will form a principal stand of the survey, as well as consideration of the author's relationship to such interpretive categories as melodrama, sensation, and satire.
This article arises from a 2011 interview with producer Andy Harries. Earlier that year the BBC h... more This article arises from a 2011 interview with producer Andy Harries. Earlier that year the BBC had aired three ninety-minute adaptations of the detective novels by Michael Dibdin featuring the character Aurelio Zen. The interview and subsequent article focus on the process by which the novels were chosen, the intended audience, casting, international co-financing, changes between page and screen, and the adaptations’ relationship to other texts notably Wallander also produced by Harries.
This essay outlines the key features of a narrative formula that I have termed elsewhere the ‘tea... more This essay outlines the key features of a narrative formula that I have termed elsewhere the ‘team film’ (see Strong 2006, 2008). In particular it addresses aspects of dialogue that enact the motifs of the team film; though the formula is constituted not only in what is said but in visual, structural and other dimensions of the texts under consideration.
This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol’s L’eau des collines and its film adaptations Jean de Florett... more This chapter examines Marcel Pagnol’s L’eau des collines and its film adaptations Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (Dir. Claude Berri, 1986). Methodologically, its principal innovation in revisiting these films is an engagement with theories from the critical literature of Travel and Tourism Studies to elucidate the desire of readers and viewers to visit places associated with cherished texts. The films’ role in the subsequent explosion of tourist interest and second-home ownership in Provence is discussed in terms of the proposed concept of ‘adaptation tourism’, and the sometimes fraught relationship between incomers and locals is framed as analogous to the key themes of Pagnol’s story. Combining tourism-oriented analyses with ideas drawn from critiques of heritage film, Provence is examined as a ‘cultural landscape’, its meanings constructed in part by books and screen texts and its ownership – both literal and interpretive – contested across fault-lines of belonging.
Art,” from e Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares comically des... more Art,” from e Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares comically describe a ctional article in which the category of “insipid” is listed as one of the four basic tastes, sweetness being discovered later! 2. Len Deighton, abc of French Food (New York: Bantam, 1989),
The mini-series Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond, which aired in the U.S. on BBC America and in... more The mini-series Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond, which aired in the U.S. on BBC America and in the U.K. on Sky Atlantic in 2014, offered an entertaining and glamorised account of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Focusing in particular on Fleming’s time during the Second World War, a period in which he served in British Naval Intelligence, successive episodes comprised embroidered accounts of his experiences, with a heavy emphasis on scenes and motifs that chimed with the doings of his most famous character. This approach to the author’s life-story foregrounded the same elements upon which previous small-screen biographies of Ian Fleming had focused, especially his creation of Bond. The TV film Goldeneye: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1989) addressed his wartime experiences and subsequent Bond writing, while Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1990) doubled down on its Bond connections by casting Jason Connery (son of original film 007, Sean Connery) as Fleming in a Second World War adventure with numerous James Bond parallels. Likewise, Ian Fleming: Bondmaker (2005) and Ian Fleming: Where Bond Began (2008) both framed Fleming first and foremost in terms of his literary creation. With high production values, and a strong cast that included Dominic Cooper, Lara Pulver, and Samuel West, Fleming bore several of the hallmarks of what has come to be called “quality television” (Thompson, 1997) , and was heavily promoted in the weeks running up to its broadcast. However, a contemporary review in Wired by Graeme McMillan saw it as evidence of a problematic tendency in recent biopics. McMillan asserted that while such texts were previously “a mix of entertainment, education and guilt-free voyeurism,” they have become “a contradictory mix of hagiography and revisionism, lionizing their subjects while somehow managing to diminish them in comparison to the products of their imagination” (McMillan, 2014). In this chapter I will look to unpick this contention, and—in particular—to approach Fleming and the author biopic in terms of adaptation.
This article contends that the final two novels of Thomas Hardy, "Tess of the d'Urbervil... more This article contends that the final two novels of Thomas Hardy, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and "Jude the Obscure," are subject to a variety of different readings. Both novels appear to have affiliations to a range of literary genres and modes, most of which are eschewed by their adaptations. The work of Hardy was considered to suffer from a variety of faults, including his attraction to melodrama and his reliance on coincidence.
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