Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781438437484)

The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather than examining the processes by which a particular author has been adapted into a diversity of films by different filmmakers, the contributors in Hitchcock at the Source consider the processes by which a varied range of literary sources have been transformed by one filmmaker into an impressive body of work.

Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock transformed a variety of literary sources--novels, plays, short stories--into what is arguably the most coherent and distinctive (narratively, stylistically, and thematically) of all directorial oeuvres. After an introduction surveying the nature and diversity of Hitchcock's sources and locating the current volume in the context of theoretical work on adaptation, nineteen original essays range across the entirety of Hitchcock's career, from the silent period through to the 1970s. In addition to addressing the process of adaptation in particular films in terms of plot and character, the contributors also consider less obvious matters of tone, technique, and ideology; Hitchcock's manipulation of the conventions of literary and dramatic genres such as spy fiction and romantic comedy; and more general problems, such as Hitchcock's shift from plays to novels as his major sources in the course of the 1930s.

Author: R. Barton Palmer
ISBN-10: 143843748X
ISBN-13: 9781438437484
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2011
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.99lbs
Size: 9.04h x 6.08w x 0.86d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2012
Reference and Research Bk News 10/01/2011 pg. 190