New readings of literary and cinematic texts are presented here in historical context, informed by cultural theory. In her survey of the history of Spanish cinema in the dictatorship and democratic periods, the author argues that studies of adaptations must simultaneously address questions of 'text' - formal issues central to the study of film and literature - and 'context' - ideological concerns crucial to late twentieth-century Spain. She examines three themes of particular importance to contemporary Spanish culture - the recuperation of history, the negotiation of the rural and the urban, and the representation of gender - and considers the related stylistic issues of the affinities between cinematic expression and nostalgia, the city and phallocentrism. The study concludes with an analysis of the formal question of the narrator in film and literature, through an assessment of Buñuel's previously unacknowledged stylistic debt to Galdós as manifested in his adaptations of Nazarín and Tristana.
SALLY FAULKNER is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter.
Reviews
A valuable scholarly addition to both film and literary criticism. It persuasively argues the need for the study of literary adaptations in Spanish film and television and supports this with shrewd and detailed formal and contextual analyses that are strengthened by a sensitive yet adventurous use of theory. JOURNAL OF IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIESThis original and suggestive study [.] deserves to be celebrated for its critical analysis of certain adaptations and its metacritical contribution to the study of adaptations in contemporary Spanish cinema. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS HISPANICOS
Should be regarded as a significant contribution to textual studies in both Hispanic literature and film, and for its investigation of the new meanings generated when the two forms meet with resulting textual and historical shifts in literary adaptations. STUDIES IN HISPANIC CINEMA
A useful contextual analysis of this cinematographic area of study that brings together critical theory with thematic and historical analysis. THE BULLETIN