Beginning with the premise that the biopic is a form of adaptation and an example of intermediality, this collection examines the multiplicity of 'source texts' and the convergence of different media in this genre, alongside the concurrent issues of fidelity and authenticity that accompany this form. The contributors focus on big and small screen biopics of British celebrities from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, attending to their myth-making and myth-breaking potential. Related topics are the contemporary British biopic's participation in the production and consumption of celebrated lives, and the biopic's generic fluidity and hybridity as evidenced in its relationship to such forms as the bio-docudrama. Offering case studies of film biographies of literary and cultural icons, including Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Diana Princess of Wales, John Lennon, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Beau Brummel, Carrington and Beatrix Potter, the essays address how British identity and heritage are interrogated in the (re)telling and showing of these lives, and how the reimagining of famous lives for the screen is influenced by recent processes of manufacturing celebrity.

This book explores the intersection between adaptation studies and what James F. English has called the “economy of prestige,” which includes formal prize culture as well as less tangible expressions such as canon formation, fandom, authorship, and performance. The chapters explore how prestige can affect many facets of the adaptation process, including selection, approach, and reception. The first section of this volume deals directly with cycles of influence involving prizes such as the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, and other major awards. The second section focuses on the juncture where adaptation, the canon, and awards culture meet, while the third considers alternative modes of locating and expressing prestige through adapted and adaptive intertexts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of adaptation, cultural sociology, film, and literature.

From Shakespeare to Autofiction focuses on salient features of authorship throughout modernity, ranging from transformations of oral tradition and the roles of empirical authors, through collaborative authorship and authorship as ‘cultural capital’, to the shifting roles of authors in recent autofiction and biofiction. In response to Roland Barthes’ ‘removal of the Author’ and its substitution by Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’, different historical forms of modern authorship are approached as ‘multiplicities’ integrated by agency, performativity and intensity in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfgang Iser, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The book also reassesses recent debates of authorship in European and Latin American literatures. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflection that takes into account the historical development of authorship and changing understandings of fiction, performativity and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from the early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autofiction), and discuss the methodologies reinstating the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of literary process. Praise for From Shakespeare to Autofiction 'In this collection a multicultural group of literary scholars analyse a rich array of authorship types and models across four centuries. After decades of liquid poststructuralist concepts, it is refreshing and inspiring to think through such diversity of authorship strategies – from oral culture, through sociological constructs, to self-referential and autobiographical ontological games that writers play with us, their readers.' Pavel Drábek, University of Hull

This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.

In movies about landmark historical events such as wars, occupations, or migrations or historically important personalities, there is an unspoken set of rules for how gender ought to be expressed. Often condemned by critics for being excessively emotional or pathetic, films by female directors featuring female protagonists may be popular with audiences but judged incapable of expressing 'real' history. Audiences learn more about the past from movies than from any other form of entertainment, and historical and heritage cinemas now comprise a burgeoning scholarly field. Yet to date there has not been a book-length analysis of female film directors' innovations in films about the historical past. With and without critical recognition, women are making important stories about the past and bringing new representations of agency and activism to the screen, often construed in ways that mobilise the past for the present, and always filtered through the lens of contemporary feminisms. Julia Erhart's new book situates women filmmakers' work within a context of other women directors from France, Denmark, Iran, Australia, the UK, the United States, and Spain and draws connections between their representational strategies and their concerns with visioning the past within the prism of the present. Written in an approachable yet theoretically informed prose, Erhart compellingly explores how foundational historiographic concepts like valour, memory, and resistance are re-envisioned within uniquely revised sub-genres that include biopics, historical documentaries, Holocaust movies, and films about the 'War on Terror'. Gendering History on Screen demonstrates how directors shape audiences' sense of the past, contour globally-relevant themes and narratives to suit female characters, and map a critique of national policies and institutions on to contemporary feminisms. Gendering History will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical film and women's cinema.

Biopics and other movies and television shows based on real events are increasingly appearing at the multiplex and on streaming platforms alongside blockbuster franchises and adaptations. The appeal of movies and television shows based on true stories is that they claim to tell us what really happened, with the public and private versions of events packaged into one coherent narrative. But how do they do it, and what makes this version of events so appealing? The Biopic and Beyond investigates the process that turns the distant public figures that populate news and entertainment into screen characters that we can engage with and try to understand a little better. Even though they aren't the real thing, our engagement with fictionalized versions of public figures can, for better or worse, color the way we understand the real person behind them. Screen engagement with the fake person behind the real person doesn't only happen in biopics and docudramas, with media as varied as sketch comedy, fan fiction and the celebrity cameo contributing to the ways we understand public figures. Using case studies such as Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network, Sarah Palin and Saturday Night Live, and Louis C.K. and Louie, The Biopic and Beyond will make you think about the way you see the world through a fictionalized version of it.