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Great Expectations

Great Expectations
Great Expectations
This essay examines how Great Expectations, often characterised as Dickens’s ‘best-loved’ novel, has also become one of his most frequently adapted, and suggests that the relationship is not as straightforward as it might appear. Recently, Rachel Malik (2012) has provided us with a promising new avenue for enquiry, attributing the novel’s enduring power and adaptability to its unusual ‘capsularity’, by means of which particular storylines or even paragraphs can be easily extracted for remediation elsewhere. I demonstrate here through an analysis of several different – and often lesser-known – examples of such extractions and remediations that situating Great Expectations in a nascent Victorian version of multiplatform publishing of which Dickens was well aware as he was writing offers enormous potential for a better understanding, both of his main creative preoccupations in 1860-61, and of the novel’s power over time and space.
Dickens, Great Expectations, Darwin, environment, heredity, guilt, Victorian England, multimedia publishing, adaptation, film, television, radio, theatre, translation, melodrama, gender, class.
Oxford University Press
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
Jordan, John
Patten, Robert
Waters, Catherine
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
Jordan, John
Patten, Robert
Waters, Catherine

Hammond, Mary (2017) Great Expectations. In, Jordan, John, Patten, Robert and Waters, Catherine (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens. Oxford. Oxford University Press. (In Press)

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This essay examines how Great Expectations, often characterised as Dickens’s ‘best-loved’ novel, has also become one of his most frequently adapted, and suggests that the relationship is not as straightforward as it might appear. Recently, Rachel Malik (2012) has provided us with a promising new avenue for enquiry, attributing the novel’s enduring power and adaptability to its unusual ‘capsularity’, by means of which particular storylines or even paragraphs can be easily extracted for remediation elsewhere. I demonstrate here through an analysis of several different – and often lesser-known – examples of such extractions and remediations that situating Great Expectations in a nascent Victorian version of multiplatform publishing of which Dickens was well aware as he was writing offers enormous potential for a better understanding, both of his main creative preoccupations in 1860-61, and of the novel’s power over time and space.

Text
II.19 Hammond FINAL - Accepted Manuscript
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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 2017
Keywords: Dickens, Great Expectations, Darwin, environment, heredity, guilt, Victorian England, multimedia publishing, adaptation, film, television, radio, theatre, translation, melodrama, gender, class.
Organisations: English

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 408368
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/408368
PURE UUID: 14e3a58c-9ce9-48f8-82ec-d66acbe33006

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Date deposited: 19 May 2017 04:04
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 13:22

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Contributors

Author: Mary Hammond
Editor: John Jordan
Editor: Robert Patten
Editor: Catherine Waters

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