Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, this collection offers analysis of both the novel itself and its adaptations. In spite of a mixed response from critics, Les Misérables instantly became a global bestseller. Since its successful publication over 150 years ago, it has traveled across different countries, cultures, and media, giving rise to more than 60 international film and television variations, numerous radio dramatizations, animated versions, comics, and stage plays. Most famously, it has inspired the world's longest running musical, which itself has generated a wealth of fan-made and online content. Whatever its form, Hugo’s tale of social injustice and personal redemption continues to permeate the popular imagination. This volume draws together essays from across a variety of fields, combining readings of Les Misérables with reflections on some of its multimedia afterlives, including musical theater and film from the silent period to today's digital platforms. The contributors offer new insights into the development and reception of Hugo's celebrated classic, deepening our understanding of the novel as a work that unites social commentary with artistic vision and raising important questions about the cultural practice of adaptation.

Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, this collection combines readings of the best-selling novel with reflections on how it has permeated the popular imagination through a selection of its multimedia adaptations including musical theater and film from the silent period to today's digital platforms. The essays deepen our understanding of Les Misérables as a work that blends social commentary with artistic vision and raise important questions about the cultural practice of adaptation.

French novels, plays, poems and short stories, however temporally or culturally distant from us, continue to be incarnated and reincarnated on cinema screens across the world. From the silent films of Georges Méliès to the Hollywood production of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary directed by Sophie Barthes, The History of French Literature on Film explores the key films, directors, and movements that have shaped the adaptation of works by French authors since the end of the 19th century. Across six chapters, Griffiths and Watts examine the factors that have driven this vibrant adaptive industry, as filmmakers have turned to literature in search of commercial profits, cultural legitimacy, and stories rich in dramatic potential. The volume also explains how the work of theorists from a variety of disciplines (literary theory, translation theory, adaptation theory), can help to deepen both our understanding and our appreciation of literary adaptation as a creative practice. Finally, this volume seeks to make clear that adaptation is never a simple transcription of an earlier literary work. It is always simultaneously an adaptation of the society and era for which it is created. Adaptations of French literature are thus not only valuable artistic artefacts in their own right, so too are they important historical documents which testify to the values and tastes of their own time.

This collection presents new essays in the complex field of French literary adaptation. Using a variety of textual and interpretive approaches, it sheds light on issues of gender, sexuality, class, politics and social conventions while acknowledging a range of contexts, from the commercial to the archival and the aesthetic. The chapters, written by eminent international scholars, run chronologically from The Count of Monte Cristo through Proust and Bonjour, Tristesse to Philippe Djian’s Oh... (adapted for the screen as Elle). Collectively, they fill a need for contemporary discussions on the significance of France’s literary representations in the history of global cinema.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Misérables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

"This book explores musicalizations of Arthurian legend as filtered through specific versions of the tale as told by Mark Twain, T.H. White, and Monty Python. For centuries, Arthurian legend with its tales of Camelot, romance, and chivalry has captured imaginations throughout Europe and the Americas. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, musical versions of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have abounded in the United States, shaping the legend for American audiences through song. The ever-shifting, age-old tale of King Arthur and his world is one which thrives on adaptation for its survival. New generations tell the story in their own ways, updating or enhancing the relevance for a fresh audience. Taking a case study approach, this work foregrounds the role of music in selected Arthurian adaptations, examining six stage and film musicals. It considers how musical versions in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture interpret the legend of King Arthur, contending that music guides the audience to understand this well-known tale and its characters in new and unexpected ways. All of the productions considered include an overtly modern perspective on the legend, intruding and even commenting on the tale of King Arthur. Shifting from an idealistic utopia to a silly place, the myriad notions of Camelot offer a look at the importance of myth in American popular culture"--

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television. Contents Introduction, Kate Griffiths I Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate Griffiths II Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew Watts III Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew Watts IV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew Watts V Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate Griffiths VI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate Griffiths Conclusion, Andrew Watts

The first comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre from its origins, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical offers both a historical account of musical theatre from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of key works and productions that illustrate its aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings.