Herbert Sussman, Editor

Alice in Manhattan

U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER

Facing Britain's Imperial Past?

KATE NICHOLS

The Victorian Art Scene in 2016: Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists and Marie Spartali

Stillman's Overdue Retrospective in the UK

MARGARET D. STETZ

The Fallen Woman

HILARY FRASER

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity's detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept's abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural history? Such questions have already commissioned a range of critical projects that attempt to reframe the Anthropocene itself: as a trope of science fiction, given how humans are “terraforming” the planet (Heise 215–20); as an object for media archaeology, considering the “signatures” that our aggregate actions are leaving in the physical strata of the earth (Boes and Marshall 64–67); and as a challenge to the categorical distinctions by which historical study is practiced, with its blurring of “human history” and “natural history” (Chakrabarty 201–07).

In this passage, quoted from Grant Allen's 1897 bestseller The Type-writer Girl, the New-Woman-turned-typist Juliet Appleton decides to quit typing in a London law office where she is forced to “click, click, click all day like a machine.” As an alternative and a release, she jumps on her bicycle and rides for an “idyllic” anarchic farm in the countryside (11). There across the Weald of Sussex and Surrey, the bicycling Juliet encounters two other forms of mobility, that of the train and the horse-driven carriage. The train, an icon of industrial modernity that “annihilated time and space” (Schivelbusch 36), rumbles brutally over the green fields and terrifies the horses, which are symbols of a natural, organic, preindustrial world. But Juliet's bicycle seems to create a balance between the two worlds. The bicycle as the never-failing steel horse enables her to utilize the achievements of industrial mechanization and also allows for a degree of freedom and human agency. Juliet is portrayed as a true modern heroine and an “unabashed” daughter of the industrial age, because she seems to possess a new subjectivity bred and made possible by the partnership between machine and nature, mechanical power and organic energy.

“The book was nothing like the film,” complained one of my students about a week or so after the premiere of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). Barely able to contain his disgust, he added: “I expected it to be as exciting as the film, but it turned out to be dull – and it appeared to be written for children!” Stunned with the virulence of his reaction, I thought how much his response to the book mirrored – as if through a looking glass – that most common of complaints voiced by many reviewers and overheard in book lovers’ discussions of film adaptations: “not as good as the book.” Both views reflect the hierarchical approach to adaptations traditionally employed by film studies and literature studies respectively. While adaptations of Victorian literature have been used – with more or less enthusiasm – as teaching aides as long as user-friendly video formats were made widely available, it is only recently that film adaptation started to be considered as an object of academic study in its own right and on an equal footing with works of literature (or, for that matter, films based on original screenplays). Adaptation studies came into its own in early twenty-first century on the heels of valuable work done by scholars such as Brian McFarlane (1996), Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999), James Naremore (2000), Robert Stam (2000), Sarah Cardwell (2002), and Kamilla Elliott (2003) which paved the way for a consideration of film adaptations beyond the fidelity debate. The field was solidified with the establishment in 2006 of the UK-based Association of Literature on Screen Association (called Association of Adaptation Studies from 2008) and the inception of its journal Adaptation, published by Oxford University Press, in 2008. Interdisciplinary in nature, the field primarily brought together literature and film scholars who insisted that adaptations were more than lamentably unfaithful or vulgar versions of literature mired in popular culture and market issues on the one hand, or merely derivative, impure cinema on the other. The foundational tenets of adaptation studies therefore included a non-judgemental and non-hierarchical approach to the relationship between the text and its adaptation, and a keen awareness of film production contexts. These vividly illustrate the field's move away from discussing fidelity to the “original” which, thanks to the work of Linda Hutcheon (2006), started to be increasingly referred to simply as “adapted text.” Hutcheon's book came out at the same time as another foundational monograph on the subject, Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (2005) which contributed to the debate through its focus on intertextual links and the palimpsestuous nature of adaptations, in which debate on fidelity was substituted with the analysis of the distance between the text and its adaptation(s).

Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.