ADAPTING THE DICKENSIAN CAROL: Filmic Realism in Film Adaptation

Abstract

Literature and cinema have always been an integral part of culture. Both art forms are interrelated through an unbreakable bound that joins shared origins, means, and purposes. Art begets art which explains how literature, theatre and photography beget the cinematic medium. Adaptation studies is a discipline that explores the literary cinematic connection. The Victorian English novelist Charles Dickens offered the literary sphere a highly optical fiction that triggers picturing. This dissertation examines the cinematic qualities in Dickens’s most adapted text A Christmas Carol. The Dickensian Carol has appealed to all performing art forms, particularly cinema. The chapters in this work develop logically to introduce film adaptation and the art of the films in relation to literature, and investigate the cinematic features of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and its cultural and historical significance