Abstract
The concluding chapter argues that placing the reappearance of characters in its broader literary, cultural and legal context enables us to discuss the issues of originality and authorial property in the nineteenth century and beyond from a hitherto unexplored perspective. It suggests that shedding light on the history of the relation between aesthetic and legal discourses can help us contextualise and critique notions such as intertextuality and disciplines such as adaptation studies, through which we understand the relations between texts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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- 1.
See Hélène Maurel-Indart, Du plagiat (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 225–26.
- 2.
On the author as a worker from the viewpoint of the 1793 law on literary property, see Bernard Edelman, Le Sacre de l’auteur (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 375–78.
- 3.
On the shift from ‘la propriété littéraire’ to ‘le droit d’auteur’ and the emergence of the moral rights of the author, see Pierre Recht, Le Droit d’auteur, une nouvelle forme de propriété: Histoire et théorie (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1969), 48–89; Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 82–83, 94–106; Stig Strömholm, Le Droit morale de l’auteur en droit allemand, français et scandinave avec un aperçu de l’évolution internationale: Étude de droit comparé, 2 vols (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Sönersförlag, 1966).
- 4.
For a summary discussion of the 1957 law in the context of the development of authorial rights in France, see Baldwin, The Copyright Wars, 202, 204–08.
- 5.
For examples see, e.g., Baldwin, The Copyright Wars, 40–47.
- 6.
Julia Kristeva, Σημειωτική: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 146.
- 7.
Ibid., 144.
- 8.
Kate Griffiths stresses, e.g., ‘the anticipation of elements of intertextual theory in the work of our case study nineteenth-century French novelists. Adaptations, whatever their form and media, of Zola, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Verne, cannot irrevocably be written off as inferior copies of a superior textual original, for these authors, in very different ways, self-consciously borrow from a host of different sources, dramatising their own acts of adaptation and playfully pointing to their multiple points of origin. Such authors find their own literary originality, paradoxically, by showcasing their own borrowing from elsewhere. Furthermore, the adaptations selected of them for this book frequently engage with their source author’s debate on literary originality’: see Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 10.
- 9.
Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 17.
- 10.
Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2013), 21.
- 11.
Ibid., 7, 8, 9. This view is not espoused by all adaptation theorists; for a critique of the idea that adaptation is a case of intertextuality, see, e.g., Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does It Matter?,’ in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 94–96.
- 12.
Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 26.
- 13.
Ibid., 47.
- 14.
Simone Murray, ‘The Business of Adaptation,’ in Cartmell, A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, 128. For a model of analysis of adaptations which focuses on their context and the adaptation industry, see Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2012).
- 15.
Summaries of the state of the field of adaptation studies or attempts at a general theorisation of adaptation as a practice usually make no mention of legal issues and no attempt to historicise the notion of adaptation: see, e.g., Rainer Emig, ‘Adaptation in Theory,’ in Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts, ed. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 14–24; the introduction to Adaptation Studies. New Challenges, New Directions, ed. Jørgen Bruhn et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–16; Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptations at the Crossroads,’ Adaptation 1, no. 1 (2008): 63–77. In Timothy Corrigan’s brief account of the history of the relation between film and literature, issues of copyright are only mentioned in passing: see ‘Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–43.
- 16.
See, e.g., the different paradigms of adaptation analysed by Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133–81.
- 17.
Sanders incidentally mentions that ‘there are also legal and economic factors: Shakespeare is helpfully outside copyright law, making him safe as well as interesting to adapt’: see Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 48.
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Paraschas, S. (2018). Concluding Reflections. In: Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69290-6_7
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