Richard J Hand in ‘Populism and Ideology: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Cinema’ explores the adaptation of nineteenth-century fiction into film. The focus of the chapter is on the cinematic adaptation of four extremely different yet continuingly popular texts at opposite ends of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). After outlining the legacy of the selected examples of fiction on film, Hand explores the critical issues and the ideological ramifications that surface through these adaptive processes. The dramatization of each text brings out diverse issues relating to popularization and ideology. This is particularly pertinent with the processes of both inter-cultural adoption and inter-generic transposition, such as the relocating of Austen within a contemporary Indian context, the redeployment of Conrad’s narrative within the Vietnam War and the appropriation of Shelley and James into the populist contexts of the horror genre.
