Hsiu-Chang Deppman puts landmark contemporary Chinese films in the context of their literary origins & explores how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives & styles for film.

Once you understand the basics of screenwriting, ideas for your next screenplay are everywhere. Whether it comes from a favorite children’s book, a summer novel you discover accidentally, a news story that catches your imagination, or a chapter from your own life — advanced screenwriting strategies should now guide you through your first adaptation. In Screen Adaptation: Beyond the Basics, award-winning screenwriter Eric Williams uses examples from award-winning screenplays to explain new storytelling techniques. His real-world examples illustrate a range of advanced approaches — including new ways to identify and craft tension, how to reimagine structure and character, and how to strengthen emotional depth in your characters and in the audience. Screen Adaptation: Beyond the Basics teaches readers new ways to engage with source material in order to make successful adaptation decisions, regardless of the source material. The book offers: Three detailed examples of award-winning adaptations by the author, including the complete short story and final scripts used in the Voices From the Heartland project; Breakout boxes highlighting modern and historical adaptations and providing examples for each concept discussed in the book; More than fifty charts providing easy-to-use visual representations of complex concepts; New screenwriting techniques developed by the author, including the Triangle of Knowledge, the Storyteller’s Parallax, and the idea of Super Genres as part of a Screenwriters Taxonomy.

This book critically examines the long established tradition of adapting classic novels to film or TV screen, encompassing novelists from Jane Austen to Michael Ondaatje. 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 this book analyze a wide variety of literary dramatizations.

Adaptations considers the theoretical and practical difficulties surrounding the translation of a text into a film, and also looks at the reverse process: the novelisation of films

This is a comprehensive survey of the relationship between film and literature. It looks at the cinematic adaptations of such literary masters as Shakespeare, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, and considers the contribution to the cinema made by important literary figures as Harold Pinter, James Agree and Graham Greene. Elsewhere, the book draws intriguing analogies between certain literary and film artists, such as Dickens and Chaplin, Ford and Twain, and suggests that such analogies can throw fresh light on the subjects under review. Another chapter considers the film genre of the bio-pic, the numerous cinematic attempts to render in concrete terms the complexities of the literary life, whether the writer be Proust, Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Dashiel Hammett, Agatha Christie or Boris Pasternak. Originally published in 1986, this is a book to appeal to any reader with an interest in film or literature, and is of especial value to those involved in the teaching or study of either subject.

From their first appearance in print, Dickens's fictions immediately migrated into other media, and particularly, in his own time, to the stage. Since then Dickens has continuously, apparently inexhaustibly, functioned as the wellspring for a robust mini-industry, sourcing plays, films, television specials and series, operas, new novels and even miniature and model villages. If in his lifetime he was justly called 'The Inimitable', since his death he has become just the reverse: the Infinitely Imitable. The essays in this volume, all appearing within the past twenty years, cover the full spectrum of genres. Their major shared claim to attention is their break from earlier mimetic criteria - does the film follow the novel? - to take the new works seriously within their own generic and historical contexts. Collectively, they reveal an entirely 'other' Dickensian oeuvre, which ironically has perhaps made Dickens better known to an audience of non-readers than to those who know the books themselves.

Adaptation studies has historically been neglected in both the English and Film Studies curricula. Reflecting on this, Screen Adaptation celebrates its emergence in the late 20th and 21st centuries and explores the varieties of methodologies and debates within the field. Drawing on approaches from genre studies to transtexuality to cultural materialism, the book examines adaptations of both popular and canonical writers, including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and J.K.Rowling. Original and provocative, this book will spark new thinking and research in the field of adaptation studies. Mapping the way in which this exciting field has emerged and shifted over the last two decades, the book is also essential reading for students of English Literature and Film.