Heritage film, costume film, period film, literary adaptation - often these terms address an overlapping corpus of films. For a long time it has been unfashionable to view these films primarily as adaptations, in spite of the fact that even today the presumably long-dead fidelity criticism is still regularly evoked as a straw man in semiotic and narrative film studies. There is clearly an automatic difference between film and literature in terms of semiotic appearance and the widely different apparatus of production and reception. The adjective “literary” adaptation, as well as the recurrence of authors in titles (Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1992; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1994), however, invoke the (untenable) primacy of literature as a cultural norm. In the medium-unspecific term “heritage” the transmedial cultural function of film, tourism, literature, educational and historical discourse emerges. All of these terms converge in the idea of a secondary, even subservient pastness of these films - a pastness which is divulged by costume, signalled by the “period” quality and implied in the canonized literary precursor. It follows that the terms “literary adaptation” and “heritage film” also converge in the idea of the canonical, in the body of cultural works accepted by consensus as valid and meaningful to a given community. Because of this, the term heritage film is useful in addressing issues of national, ethnic, cultural, class, and gender identities that are crucial in analyses of these films. This chapter attempts to account for the curious transnational and transcultural migration of heritage concepts which were originally and uniquely formulated in Britain, and are, for instance, largely absent from American research into adaptations and from period and costume films.

Andrew Davies is, undoubtedly, one of the most successful and prolific writers and adaptors for television and cinema; included in his oeuvre are A Very Peculiar Practice (1986, 1988), Pride and Prejudice (1995), Tipping the Velvet (2002), The Way We Live Now (2001), Bridget Jones's Diary (1996), and Bleak House (2005). Although best known for his work in television and cinema, Andrew Davies is also a writer for both adults and children and has written for the stage and radio. He spoke to Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan twice; over lunch in Birmingham and in a public conversation at De Montfort University, Leicester. Speaking about authorship, fidelity, audiences, casting, and his past and current projects, Davies offers insight into his distinctive “televisual” aesthetic.

What is the common feature of books such as King Kong (Delos W. Lovelace), La Dolce Vita (Lo Duca), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Jean-Claude Carrière), Les 400 coups (François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy), Jabberwocky (Ralph Hoover), Basic Instinct (Richard Osborne), The Full Monty (Wendy Holden), Saving Private Ryan (Max Allan Collins) or eXistenZ (Luther Novak)? Are they (unknown) books adapted into (famous) movies, following the old saying that only bad literature can be turned into good cinema? Quite the contrary: all these books are novelizations, i.e. novels based on previous and normally “original” filmic texts (I will come back later to the question on the meaning of the word “text”).

Within the field of film and literature studies, novelizations represent an ignored field, whose quantitative importance (since there exists a real novelization industry) and qualitative diversity (since “novelization” has many meanings depending on various national and linguistic traditions in which it appears) has never been fully acknowledged. Today, however, this situation seems to be changing rather rapidly. First, economically speaking, novelizations have become more visible, following the generalization of “cross-media narrative” in contemporary Hollywood storytelling and hence the subsequent multiplication of novelized films. In fact, each major Hollywood film that is not based itself upon a previous novel or play tends to be transformed into a novel (among other types of commercial tie-ins, of course). But there is also a second reason, which is more academic and which has to do with the crisis of traditional adaptation studies in the film and literature field. The critical questioning of most of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of adaptation studies are both cause and effect of the new interest in novelization.

There is little doubt even in the contemporary era when animation enjoys a high artistic, cultural, and popular profile, that the combination of high literature - “the classic” - and the “cartoon,” still seems an unholy alliance. One wonders, for example, what director Brad Bird said to Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, when preparing his adaptation of The Iron Giant (1999) - “Great poetic narrative Ted, but don't you think it's short on chases and custard pies?” This, of course, is to caricature both practices - literature as the embodiment of elevated “art” and animation as a vehicle only for comic events, slapstick, and spectacle. Neither is accurate, and in the case of The Iron Giant, Bird abandoned the more readily “animatable” and spectacular second half of Hughes's narrative to concentrate on the core relationship between a boy and a robot in a quasi-realist cartoon style. Nothing, then, should be taken for granted, and this discussion will seek to explore a range of perspectives on the relationship between classic literature and animation, and will extend a personal preoccupation on this matter. I have written elsewhere, for example, about the technical and aesthetic correspondence between literary practice and the animated form in the process of adaptation, and I have also looked at the ways in which particular kinds of literary criticism may be applied to the analysis of animation, resulting in my own conception of the “subjective correlative.” Both these discussions will be drawn upon and reiterated again here, but the broad intention on this occasion is to explore literary texts for the mechanisms and methodologies which render them suitable for animation, and the ways, thereafter, that animation, in turn, reveals the core intentions, values, and aesthetic outcomes of those texts to best effect.

The discussion of music rarely plays a major role in novels. In many cases, it is not mentioned at all. Nevertheless, in screen adaptations music is likely to play a significant role: it may be commissioned solely for the adaptation; a collection of pre-existent (or newly composed) tracks may be compiled; or, a producer may choose a combination of both. While our attention may not always be directed towards it, music in films and television programs always affects our experience of the image and narrative in some way, even when not consciously attended to. Think of John Williams's score for Steven Spielberg's 1975 adaptation of Peter Benchley's novel Jaws, for example.

Film and television scoring is both a product and a practice of the “long” twentieth century: an aesthetic and pragmatic response to the development of specific technologies and cultural forms. Of course, music itself is both a cultural product and a cultural practice. As such, musical composition, performance, and reception are subject to the more general transformations of society and culture over time, and those experienced by composers, performers, and listeners. In this way, the discussion of music in classic novels offers intriguing insights into the changing character of perceived relationships between music and society, as an exploration of the BBC's 1995 serial adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) demonstrates. A discussion of the use of pre-existent music in the screen adaptation of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice follows. First, however, an introduction to music's potential on screen is necessary.

The nineteenth-century novel has been a staple of twentieth-century entertainment. For decades, film companies have been producing adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, as have television companies like the BBC and ITV. Why are these authors so popular? First of all, they tell good stories. They also have name recognition and prestigious cultural associations. They provide good visuals. Finally, their works are out of copyright.

Judging by the rate of production and consumption, both American and British audiences have an insatiable hunger for films with historical settings and films based on great books. For some, historical films and serials provide entertainment, allowing a temporary escape from a modern world of care, predictability, or dullness. For others, they provide fare more intellectual than the blockbuster films that dominate at the multiplex cinema. In particular, they appeal to women (an audience that film companies have often neglected) with their foregrounding of relationships and women's issues. With the development of home VCR and DVD players, films and television serials have gained an extended life. No longer does a television adaptation vanish from the cultural consciousness after its broadcast. The success of newer adaptations even means a release on DVD of older versions, too. Thanks to the phenomenal reception of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, the BBC and ITV Austen adaptations from the 1970s and early 1980s have been released in inexpensive DVD versions.

When examining popular fiction and its metamorphosis into film it is immediately clear that we are not just concerned with the relationship between an individual book and its cinematic interpretation, but with the history of genre fiction in the two media, and the place it is accorded in literary and film studies respectively. Popular romantic fiction is assigned the position of a “debased” genre and most commonly spoken about in terms of the mass market romance, which nonetheless claims its inspiration from some canonical classics, including Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre. In commercial terms it is a lucrative market, but critics regard its content as predictable, ideologically conservative, and undemanding of its reader. With very few nods to historical change, it has a formula which requires little adjustment to maintain its momentum; it has not matured into a literary form with active defenders (such as the fields of science fiction or the crime novel), and even now very few readers are keen to publicize their love of the genre. Romance assumes women are its readers and at the “bottom end” of the market - Mills & Boon or Harlequin - the publishers' market research has allowed them to consistently produce bestsellers, albeit those where the author's name is of little consequence. Critical attention was mainly negative until feminist critics reviewed their initial hostility to the manipulativeness of the form and turned their gaze on the woman as reader. From this perspective, and represented by pathfinding texts such as Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance (1982) and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1987), there evolved some acute insights into the way women use popular cultural forms to negotiate their own life certainties and to endorse choices that can, without much interrogation, be shown to have little to do with the vicissitudes of relationships and romantic love.

Since the late 1970s the dominant genre of Hollywood blockbusters has been fantasy, and it is not hard to see why. Science fiction extravaganzas, comic book adaptations, and epic series like Star Wars (1977-2005), Harry Potter (2001 ongoing), The Chronicles of Narnia (2005 ongoing) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) appeal internationally to the crucial teenage demographic; encourage fannish absorption in their expandable universes; showcase advances in special effects; and lend themselves readily to sequels, spin-offs and other commercially essential tie-ins.

Although Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which inspired the continuing wave of fantasy, were original stories, fantasy films nowadays more usually derive from pre-existing novels, films, comic books, and video games with some built-in guarantee of audience recognition and cult interest. But the process is not one of simple “adaptation.” A film like The Lord of the Rings is a starting place as much as an end product of adaptation: just one reference point in a matrix of intertextual relations created by synergic cross-promotion. Video games, graphic and literary novelizations, CD soundtracks, multiple Director's Cuts and DVD versions, prequels, sequels, and franchises - such ostensibly secondary productions, included among what Gérard Genette called “paratexts,” not only extend the boundaries of contemporary Hollywood fantasy films but also increasingly determine their form and narrative.

Average film-goers probably take more notice of a film's stars than of its director. Stars or actors are, after all, visible on screen for approximately two hours whereas the director merely fronts or ends the credits. How many viewers, for example, know the directors of the Bridget Jones films (Sharon Maguire and Beeban Kidron) compared with those who know its stars, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, and Renée Zellweger? When you read a novel you hold the author's name in your hands, touching it with your finger-tips, and what you see in reading are their words. But when a film is “based on the book, story or play by . . .,” then the author's name tends also to recede along with their text, even such a one as Helen Fielding, J. R R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, or Shakespeare. The process is, we might say, a technologically-induced version of the “death of the author” theorized by Roland Barthes in the 1960s. Barthes's intention was to demote the godlike figure of the (usually male designated) “Author” to the figure of a “scriptor” working laterally across texts, and to activate the reader, similarly, as a figure who cruised, antennae bristling, across this layered textuality, but did not pause to dig below or look behind this surface for a book's single authorized meaning. Barthes's essay, along with other theoretical essays in the same decade, by Julia Kristeva, for example, inaugurated the concept of intertextuality and the practice of intertextual reading. This was one of the major strategic features of poststructuralism and is a continuing touchstone in the Humanities. At the same time, we cannot fail to notice, almost fifty years after Barthes's essay, that in the world of everyday reading, book reviews, as well as much academic criticism, the author is as strong a presence as ever.

Film adaptation has always had a love-hate relationship with literary modernism. A creative union seemed almost certain in the 1910s and 1920s, though. Modernist writers were fascinated with visual media; German theorist Walter Benjamin proclaimed film the definitive modern form; and the modernist magazine Close Up (1927-33) was forging aesthetic links between film and literary culture “from the angles of art, experiment, and possibility.” The energies of literary and cinematic modernism in the years either side of World War I promised an imaginative movement beyond the limits of written and visual forms. Many modernist writers could be “profoundly cinematic even when not fully cognizant of it”; filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Georges Méliès and Eric von Stroheim were drawn to the written word because it lent early cinema aesthetic validity; and two 1928 versions of The Fall of the House of Usher by French director Jean Epstein and American team James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber showed what could be achieved by transforming Edgar Allan Poe's gothic tale into visually provocative cinema.

However, when it comes to cinematic adaptations of modernist fiction filmmakers have often found themselves faced with major technical problems. Critics Gilberto Perez and Sam Girgus have argued that these problems derive from the way in which modernist culture exacerbates the tension between film as a “reflective” form (representing and documenting) and a “creative” medium (reworking and transforming).

“Not for me are the things of Gyges, rich in gold, a concern, / Nor has envy yet taken me, nor do I resent / The works of the gods, and I do not desire great tyranny; / For [these things] are far from my eyes.” Archilochus fr. 19 W [= 122 W2] / “Eros again the limb-loosener whirls me, / sweet-bitter, impossible, creeping thing...” Sappho fr. 130 LP / Archaic Greek poetry confronts the reader with a sudden explosion of distinctive, individual voices from all over the Greek world, in contrast to what came before - the two great lone voices of the Greek epic tradition, Homer and Hesiod - and to what followed - the almost total dominance of Athens in the literary record of the classical period. Thus, in addition to Archilochus of Paros and Sappho of Mytilene on Lesbos (quoted above), the remains of Archaic poetry include verse composed by Hipponax of Clazomenae, Semonides of Amorgos, Xenophanes of Colophon, Solon of Athens, Theognis of Megara, Alcman of Sparta, Alcaeus of Mytilene, Stesichorus of Himera, Ibycus of Rhegion, Anacreon of Teos, Pindar of Thebes, and Simonides and Bacchylides of Ceos, spanning a period from roughly 700 to 450 BCE.

A tension between two views of the Archaic period, one emphasizing the emergence of the individual, the other stressing the importance of the community, is as dominant in approaches to colonization as in everything else. Colonization, on the one hand, is viewed as a kind of protocapitalist enterprise of self-starting, pioneering risk-takers and entrepreneurs as well as the castoffs of society (and an individual affair). Alternatively, colonization is seen as a protoimperialist movement that established Hellenism in foreign territory, secured trade for the mother city, and inscribed the polis by means of the spatial allocations of city and country that some of the earliest colonies created. Thus establishing a colony was an official activity of an established state, or city-state (polis). In encounters between Hellenes and indigenes, moreover, Greek colonization could be seen to prefigure the classic trope of Greek and Other, which was fully expressed in the struggles with the Persians that unfolded in the late Archaic period. Indeed, the definition and redefinition of Hellenic identity, of Greekness or “Hellenicity,” was ongoing and continued right through the end of Greek hegemony and on into the ascendancy of Rome. In recent years, as programs of archaeological investigation have expanded and borne fruit, and as comparative perspectives in colonial studies have gained hold, the centrality of the colonial movement to Greek identity and experience has become clear.

Lawgivers and tyrants seem at first an odd couple: of the latter we have a negative view, whereas the former make a more positive impression. Certainly, so wise a sage as Solon, the sixth-century BCE lawgiver of Athens, has found many admirers throughout history, whereas few have confessed to liking his near contemporary, Periander the tyrant of Corinth - certainly not after reading this impassioned denunciation of him: “Now while Periander was in the beginning milder than his father [Cypselus, also tyrant of Corinth], he later, owing to a correspondence with Thrasybulus, the tyrant of Miletus, became far more murderous than Cypselus . . . Periander . . . understood that Thrasybulus was advising him to murder those among the townsmen who were in any way pre-eminent. So Periander then unleashed every savagery upon the citizens, for he finished off whatever Cypselus had omitted to do in the way of killing people or sending them into exile.” (Herodotus 5.92) / Now I have started off with this passage on Periander for several reasons: first, because it shows us what sort of a reputation the tyrants in the end had, but, second, because another fact about Periander helps make a link between tyrants and lawgivers.

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel claims that there is a paradox inherent in the very notion of a “history of philosophy”: “The thought which may first occur to us in the history of Philosophy is that the subject itself contains a contradiction. For Philosophy aims at understanding what is unchangeable, eternal, in and for itself: its end is Truth. But history tells us of that which has at one time existed, at another time has vanished, having been expelled by something else. Truth is eternal; it does not fall within the sphere of the transient, and has no history.” Although few scholars would now endorse Hegel's solution to the problem of philosophy's “development in time,” the tension between philosophy and history still remains. For, if the notion of an atemporal and transhistorical truth is no longer in vogue, scholars who work in the “history of philosophy” nonetheless analyze philosophic texts in abstraction from the historical and cultural contexts that ground these discourses. Certainly this has been the dominant approach to the Archaic Greek thinkers, who have generally been treated as detached intellectual theorists since the time of Aristotle and Theophrastus (who wrote the first “histories” of philosophy). At the end of the nineteenth century, John Burnet famously characterized Archaic philosophy as “The Greek Miracle” - the extraordinary creation of a rational mode of thinking radically distinct from the discourse and “mythic” mentality of Greek culture.