On Great Expectations.pdf

Wordsworth Editions Blog, 2023

This year, the arrival of spring will be accompanied by what promises from the trailer to be a radical reimagining of Dicken’s immortal coming of age story Great Expectations, written by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight. This will be Knight’s second Dickens screenplay, following A Christmas Carol (2019), a dark reinterpretation of another familiar classic exploring themes that fans of Peaky Blinders and Taboo will instantly recognise: class, race, wealth, poverty, and crime, as well as sexuality and trauma – Dickensian subjects all. From his choice of historical and literary material, it is clear that Knight is making a lot of connections between Dickens’ century and our own, another bleak era of social inequality and unregulated turbo capitalism. With Great Expectations, Knight reunites with his regular co-producers Ridley Scott and Tom Hardy, and like A Christmas Carol, the series will again be a joint FX/BBC production. Fionn Whitehead, who starred in Dunkirk and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, will play the adult Pip; Shalom Brune-Franklin (Our Girl, The State, Line of Duty) is Estella; Ashley Thomas – AKA the rapper Bashy – is Jaggers; Johnny Harris (who was also in A Christmas Carol) is Magwitch, and Olivia Coleman is the latest Miss Havisham, following a long line of over-the-top portrayals all the way back to the definitive performance by Martita Hunt in David Lean’s Oscar-winning film version of 1946. Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ most adapted novels, with the number of film, TV, and stage versions about equal to those of Oliver Twist, both well into double figures (even the beloved David Copperfield does not come close). Only A Christmas Carol has been adapted more times. It is a familiar Dickensian fable in which what notionally appears to be a rags to riches story becomes a journey of humility and self-discovery through adversity, self-sacrifice, honest labour, and personal growth. Like David Copperfield, which it structurally resembles, being another first-person account, Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman, a ‘novel of formation’ dramatising the emotional and moral growth of the protagonist, Pip, from child to adult. A major part of the story’s enduring appeal is probably because this is a journey we all undertake; regardless of the individual circumstances, the theme is universal and monomythic, as are all the best stories. Then there’s the possibility of true moral regeneration that the story offers, as well as that pang of unrequited love that all of us have at one time felt. Or perhaps it’s the disturbingly sensual gothic charge that accompanies successive Miss Havishams, like the Wicked Queen in Snow White. The novel is also a fusion of several popular genres, combing aspects of the Newgate novel (prototype crime fiction), and the gothic with social satire and even comedy. As Dickens was writing to entertain (and therefore sell) as well as edify, the novel is also full of larger than life characters, all of whom are gifts for actors, scriptwriters, and directors.

In: New Literary History. Vol. 49, No. 3, 2018., 2018

Why are readers of novels so frequently disappointed, even indignant about the film adaptation? What could be the reasons for the often heard complaint “I prefer the book!”? In my answers to these questions I explore the grounds for reader dissatisfaction, focusing on filmed versions of illusion-creating novels, which make up a large portion of film adaptations. I hypothesize that a major reason for the sense of disappointment with filmed literature may be located in the denial of the readers’ desire for recognition, an important term in social and political theory that has more recently also sparked interest in aesthetics. My psychological hypothesis is closely linked to an aspect aptly captured by the phenomenological expression ‘mineness’: the aesthetic object of the novel, which I concretize and co-create while reading, together with the physical object of the book, which I hold in my hand, lend themselves to being felt as more fundamentally something of mine than the subsequent adaptation on the cinema screen. This amplified sense of mineness, I argue, psychologically complicates the experience of accepting and appreciating the adaptation.

This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens's vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations , a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel's portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham's clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud.

Adaptation, 2014

This article examines the BBC 2007 adaptation of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) and the BBC 2008 adaptation of Little Dorrit (1857). It explores the casting of black British actors to play non-racially marked roles, with a focus on the casting of Sophie okonedo and

Dickens Quarterly

Armenian Folia Anglistika, 2018

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations pinpoints his Victorian literary heritage. On the other hand, David Lean’s film adaptation of Dickens’ novel conveys it realistically in a period of post War II cinematic modernization. In the present paper, different points are discussed and presented; First, different critical opinions, by earlier and modern critics, as well as David Lean’s personal opinion about film adaptation are revealed and discussed. Second, Dickens’s eccentric and grotesque Victorian characters that are presented through Lean’s visually and thematically rationalized postwar characters. Third, Dickens’s extraordinary characters are contrasted with Lean’s realistic ones. Moreover, Lean’s modernistic touches to the Dickensian novel which cater the postwar audience’s need (for which reason Lean’s film is a completely intellectual one and not at all Dickensian) are also unveiled. Thus, trying to put some hope in the hopeless hearts of his audience in the aftermath of the Seco...

ARMENIAN FOLIA ANGLISTIKA, 2018

Abstract Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations pinpoints his Victorian literary heritage. On the other hand, David Lean’s film adaptation of Dickens' novel conveys it realistically in a period of post War II cinematic modernization. In the present paper, different points are discussed and presented; First, different critical opinions, by earlier and modern critics, as well as David Lean’s personal opinion about film adaptation are revealed and discussed. Second, Dickens’s eccentric and grotesque Victorian characters that are presented through Lean’s visually and thematically rationalized postwar characters. Third, Dickens’s extraordinary characters are contrasted with Lean’s realistic ones. Moreover, Lean’s modernistic touches to the Dickensian novel which cater the postwar audience’s need (for which reason Lean’s film is a completely intellectual one and not at all Dickensian) are also unveiled. Thus, trying to put some hope in the hopeless hearts of his audience in the aftermath of the Second World War, Lean’s modernization of the Dickensian era to fit in the world of his contemporary audience is proven. Key words: Dickens, Lean, postwar, Victorian, grotesque, modern, adaptation, audience, modernization, difference.

Dickens Quarterly, 2010

Modern Languages Review, 100.3, pp. 793-4, 2005

Eniac Pesquisa, 2014

As instituições se assemelham às pessoas em diversos aspectos e o presente estudo, de natureza exploratória e metodologia de base teórica e empírica, visa identificar os elementos comuns na construção e desenvolvimento da personalidade individual e institucional, concentrada nos modos de "ser", "pensar" e "agir". Os resultados preliminares apontam para similaridades, em especial no tema do "herói", foco na continuidade deste trabalho.