Fidelity to Great expectations deepened : Dickens, Lean, and Cuarón

Abstract

In 2005, Elsie Walker and David Johnson, the newly appointed editors of the journal Literature/Film Quarterly, issued the following statement on the conceptualization of the transpositional practice of filmic adaptations: Literature/Film Quarterly was first produced when "faithfulness" to original literary sources was the primary concern in adaptation studies. [ ... ] Now, over thirty years after, notions of fidelity, faithfulnes s , and authenticity have been interrogated and, to a large extent, replaced by much more permissive approaches to adaptations. [ ... ] Furthermore, the long-standing primacy of original literary texts over cinematic (re)creations has been consistently called into question. Anxiety about preservation is undone by the spirit of exploration.