Results: Through the Fellowship period, the Research Fellow gained valuable experience working with diverse archives and gathered (and collated) a rich collection of primary and secondary materials related to Charles Dickens, his writing, and, most importantly, to the transfer and translation of Dickens’s writing to the stage (and the cinema screen) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Discoveries of the geographical and historical extent of European and global dramatizations based on Dickens were somewhat surprising, with several previously unknown dramatizations uncovered, revealing complex cultural transactions across different nations in, and beyond, Europe. For some dramas that were previously known, the Research Fellow uncovered fresh evidence that revealed more extensive lines of development and transfer, in at least one case leading to a fundamental rewriting of the cultural history of A Christmas Carol, the most frequently adapted and globally recognizable of Dickens’s texts.
Perhaps the project’s most important contribution to the state of the art is its fundamental challenge to the traditional divisions between theatre and literature, as the Research Fellow has uncovered—and publicly promoted—the close relationship—indeed, interplay—between the novel and the stage. Moreover, by exploring and exploiting links between nineteenth-century dramatizations of Dickens and cinematic appropriations of Dickens across the twentieth century, the project has complicated the neat disciplinary divisions that have traditionally separated literary history and criticism from theatre studies and film studies. The Research Fellow has made the claim (repeatedly, in conference presentations) that to read (to study and to teach) Dickens (indeed, nineteenth-century literature more broadly) in isolation from or without consideration of theatrical readerships, their entanglements within their contemporary culture, and their evolving critical and cultural signification over time. The primary thrust of the project has—and continues to be—the shifting of theatrical adaptation nearer to the center of literary analysis and literary and cultural history.
The project has produced a range of outputs including articles, book chapters, performances, drama workshops, a symposium, teaching and pedagogical material and a pan-European network working towards a bid for Horizon 2020 funding.
