Sweetening Jane

Abstract

In publications and conference presentations concerning adaptation, it has been an accepted practice for at least a decade to commence with a derogation of fidelity criticism. This familiar rhetorical flourish, in which that mode of interpretation is castigated as moribund, logo-centric, and defensive of a putative literary canon, is now in danger of becoming as tiresome as the critical practice it condemns. Works by Cartmell and Whelehan, Hutcheon, Leitch, and Stam and Raengo inter alia have indeed successfully redrawn the field of adaptation studies: intertextuality; analyses of the endless intersections among filmic, literary, and other forms; and a move away from the privileging of literary source texts, have been among the notable features of this revolution. This present study seeks neither to recuperate fidelity criticism (in reputation, or as practice) nor to underplay the achievements of those scholars who have revivified the study of literature and/or film. Rather, it seeks to borrow and adapt a term that has been frequently, though not exclusively, used in fidelity criticism—“equivalence”—and to deploy it in a new context.

This article was originally published in Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 1.3 (2008): 205–21. Reproduced with revisions and a new postscript.