Abstract
This collection of articles is concerned with the intersection of medieval film studies and adaptation theory. Both fields, medieval film studies and adaptation studies, are among the most rapidly expanding subdisciplines of an interdisciplinary mix within the humanities: of film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, history, musicology, art history, theater studies, to name only a few. Within the last six to seven years the number of publications in both fields has exploded, as has the sophistication of their approaches,1 and it is high time to assess the kinds of questions, problems, and issues that link both fields in order to gauge ways in which advances in one may be put to productive use in the other.
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Notes
To name only a few examples of books on medieval film: Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011);
Richard Burt, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds., Queer Movie Medievalisms (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009);
Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, eds., Medieval Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009);
Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004);
Andrew B.R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011);
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, Cinematic Illuminations. The Middle Ages on Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010);
Nickolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden, eds., Hollywood in the Holy Land: The Fearful Symmetries of Movie Medievalism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). The advent of adaptation studies is marked especially in that Oxford University Press has dedicated a new journal, Adaptation, entirely to the subject; important recent monographs include:
Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2002);
Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2011);
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, with revised edition epilogue by Siobban O’Flynn, 2nd revised edn. (London: Routledge, 2013).
For a recent account of how the issue of accuracy matters for discussions of medieval film see Bettina Bildhauer, Filming the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion, 2011), pp. 18–22. Ironically, the most sophisticated recent studies of medieval film all seem to find it necessary to begin their attempts at theorizing medieval film by first driving out the specter of historical accuracy in one way or the other.
Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads,” Adaptation 1.1 (2008): 65 [63–77].
Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer, “Introduction: The A-chronology of Medieval Film,” in Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 2 [1–19].
See Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 1–12.
To name only a few examples: James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 2: 1350 –1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from Beowulf to Othello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008);
Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);
Curtis Perry and John Watkin, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
David Matthews and Gordon McMullan, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Methuen, 2010);
Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper and Peter Holland, eds., Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (London: The Bodley Head, 2011), esp. p. 263.
Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 7–42.
Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, Medieval Cultures 35 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 19.
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 9.
For an especially sophisticated approach of this kind see Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), pp. 7–12.
In Cerquiglini’s eyes “medieval writing does not produce variants; it is var iance. The end less rewriting to which medieval textuality is subjected, the joyful appropriation of which it is the object, invites us to make a power fulhypo thesis: the variant is never punctual ” (Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], pp. 77–78).
Incisive critical remarks on Cerquiglini’s romantic-cum-postmodern apotheosis of the medieval manuscript are to be found in Richard Utz, “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth: A Short History of Chaucerphilologie in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” Philologie im Netz 21 (2002): 58 [54–62], available at: http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin/phin21 /p21t4.htm.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55.
Margitta Rouse, “‘Hit Men on Holiday get All Medieval’: Multiple Temporalities and Media Theory in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges,” in Medievalism, ed. Ute Berns and Andrew James Johnston, special issue of European Journal of English Studies 15.2 (2011): 171–82.
For an important discussion of the ways in which Heidegger, Blumenberg, and Foucault all contributed to the philosophical underpinnings of this form of cultural history firmly grounded in the epistemologies and techniques of representation, see Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, “Outside Modernity,” in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, ed. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 2–36.
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities,” in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 122 [107–23].
Doing Time is the title of Rita Felski’s investigation of the ways in which notions of time are central to constructions of gendered identities, which in turn lead to gendered perspectives on periodization. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
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© 2014 Andrew James Johnston, Margitta Rouse, and Philipp Hinz
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Johnston, A.J., Rouse, M. (2014). Introduction: Temporalities of Adaptation. In: Johnston, A.J., Rouse, M., Hinz, P. (eds) The Medieval Motion Picture. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074249_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074249_1
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