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Full Description
This book brings film adaptation of literature to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior "master race" to "uplift" its colonized populations—morally, socially, and economically. This book argues that, on the one hand, film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels reveal the arrogance and coercive intentions that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity—improvement's post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the book also argues that the films use their nineteenth-century source texts to criticize these same legacies of imperialism. By bringing together film adaptation, postcolonial theory, and literary studies, the book demonstrates that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a way to engage with the baggage of ideological heritage in our contemporary global media environment.
Contents
1. Adapting Improvement: Screen Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century Progress.- 2. Improvement, Development, and Consumer Culture in Jane Austen and Popular Indian Cinema.- 3. Moral Management: Spaces of Domestication in Jane Eyre and I Walked with a Zombie.- 4. Conquest and Improvement in the "Graveyard of Empires": The Men Who Would Be Kings in Afghanistan and Vietnam.- 5. Unaccounted Modernities in Tess and Trishna.- 6. An Afterword and a Word Before: "Strategic Presentism" as Heritage Improved.
