novels in English. This no doubt reflects personal preference, but the choice
is also based on my sense that mainstream cinema has owed much of its
popularity to representational tendencies it shares with the nineteenth-
century English novel. However, nothing in my analysis of the texts chosen
suggests that the methodology used would be unsuited to other kinds of
novel--to, say, modernist or post-modernist fiction--though the results
yielded might exhibit different emphases.

I have limited the scope of this book in other ways, too, and thereby,
reluctantly, marginalized several other potentially productive--and cer-
tainly interesting--approaches to adaptation. These include the much
debated question of authorship in relation to film, a question which becomes
even more complex in the case of adaptation, and the influence of the
industrial and cultural context in which the film is made on how the original
novel is adapted. In the case-studies I have drawn attention to such matters
only when they appear to have been explicitly responsible for major shifts of
narrative emphasis or for certain elements in the film's enunciatory pro-
cedures. Also, the problems and issues associated with television serial
adaptation are different in many respects from those confronted by the film-
maker, and a full discussion of such differences is outside the scope of the
present study, tempting though some comparisons may be.

In spite of efforts to deal as objectively and systematically as possible with
the issues raised by adaptation, I am aware that there is a good deal in our
response to novels and films that resists such an approach. It is one thing to
identify and categorize certain key narrative functions, another to account
for how we respond to them aesthetically and affectively, and I hope my
accounts of the film--novel pairs chosen for case-studies do not suggest
otherwise. However, without wishing to raise the study of adaptation to the
level of a science, I believe it is possible to apply to it analytical methods
more rigorous than has commonly been the case. In the light of this belief,
Part I of this book will survey the field and propose an agenda for such an
approach, and Part II will test such an approach in relation to the five chosen
case-studies.

Some aspects of the chapters on Random Harvest, Great Expectations, and
Daisy Miller have provided the basis for articles published in the Literature/
Film Quarterly. I am grateful for permission to reprint here extracts from
these. My thanks are also due to colleagues at Monash University and
the University of East Anglia, to Eleni Naoumidis for her expert and
patient typing of the manuscript, and to my wife Geraldine for her support
throughout.

B. M.

Melbourne,
December 1994

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