Nineteenth‐Century American Fiction on Screen by R. Barton Palmer, Editor

Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen R. Barton Palmer, Editor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Apparently it is time now, forty years after "cinema studies" went to college, for a new shelf of anthologies concerning literary adaptations to the screen, so long as the issue of fidelity is not central to the discussions. Decades ago essay collections appeared celebrating movies made from classic American novels and fidelity to the sources adapted was usually the primary consideration; but those editors and contributors have since been promoted to obscurity, dismissed, and forgotten. So, here we go again! Time to forget fidelity on this go-around, however, and celebrate diversity and intertextuality. Time to view old spectacles with new spectacles. Uncle Tom, where art thou? Near the top of the Table of Contents, that's where. When confronted with yet another fiction-to-film anthology, readers really need to ask, why? What need, what function, what purpose will this book have? What clique or cult is being satisfied? What agenda is being served? A glance at the Table of Contents here reveals which of the usual suspects have been rounded up. By far the most recognizable and most widely published expert is Australian Brian McFarlane, on Henry James, Merchant/Ivory, and The Europeans (1979), flogging fidelity expectations and "sloppy-minded reviewers" inclined to look merely for the "spirit" of the novel. He then moves to more abstract conundrums: "What does 'Jamesian' mean?" Or, perhaps even better, "Why do people read James?" Professor McFarlane is a subtle man, as a reader of James must be, and eventually waxes theoretical, making nice distinctions between "what can be transferred (essentially, 'narrative') and what must be subject to adaptation proper (essentially, 'narration' or 'enunciation')." So, one might purchase this book in order to keep up-to-date with the current thinking of Brian McFarlane on James and cinema, but, if so, why is this piece buried in the back of the book? That is a puzzlement. Maybe there are more important critics to be honored here (doubtful), or maybe the chapters are simply arranged chronologically by famous American novelists' birth dates to give precedence to Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. That puts Uncle Tom's Cabin ahead of Moby-Dick and ahead of Henry James, whose work at least is treated in three separate chapters. But that scheme bumps McFarlane and the book's second most famous contributor (in my opinion), Tony Williams, writing once again on Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, to the verso side of the Table of Contents, where editor Barton Palmer also ends up, writing about Owen Wister's The Virginian. One concludes that the Press might have given more serious consideration to the book's organizational strategy. The idea for the book, one discovers, "emerged" from "serendipitous meetings at the Medieval Institute" (xiii), where one might not immediately expect to hear a lot of movie chatter. Editor R. Barton Palmer's first degree, from Yale, was in medieval studies, you see, before he turned to cinema studies at NYU. Tony Williams directs Film Studies at Southern Illinois University, sure enough, but he belongs to an English Department as well, as do a majority of the contributors represented here, though one of them seems to be mainly an expert on "adult comics," or, as they are now likely to be called, "graphic novels. …