Without Parents or Pedigree: Neo-Victorian Adaptation as Disavowal or Critique

It has become a truism that contemporary multi-season TV dramas are inheritors of the methods and aims of Victorian serial fiction, or, as the New York Times editorial page put it in 2006, that if “Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it.” While not absolutely denying the validity of such assertions, this essay reconsiders them. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1949 essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," now a locus classicus for thinking about the links between nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth- and twenty-first-century cinematic media, first formulated a model that has remained influential for considering Victorian fiction, and especially Dickens’s novels, as offering a “pedigree” and parentage for filmic media. But through a reading of several test cases of contemporary neo-Victorian adaptation, broadly construed—including Dickensian references in The Wire, South Park’s animated Great Expectations adaptation episode, and references to George Eliot in Kazuo Ishiguru’s novel Never Let Me Go—this essay questions and complicates Eisenstein’s paradigm of the Victorian novel as parent to contemporary media

Recall this Book 71: Jennifer Egan with Ivan Kreilkamp Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal (Novel Dialogue crossover)

This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we have Caryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread

Novel Dialogue 2.1: Fiction as Streaming, Genre as Portal: Jennifer Egan and Ivan Kreilkamp (JP)

We are just delighted to welcome you back to the second season of Novel Dialogue, putting scholars and writers together to chew the fat, and spill secrets of the trade. It begins with a bang; who better to interview the prolific and prize-winning American novelist Jennifer Egan than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread. Their conversation with John ranges widely over Egan's oeuvre, not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else's thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from her Egan's forthcoming The Candy House make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre's relationship to specialized lingos and argots and the way a genre's norms and structure can function like a "lifeline" and also a "portal." Her backyard post-writing treat is also revealed: perfect for the pandemic. N.B. John bungled two Egan publication dates in his introduction; in reality, Emerald City and Other Stories came out in 1996 and The Invisible Circus in 1995