I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have! Negotiating Nancy, hyperauthenticity and hyperfidelity in the 2007 BBC adaptation of Oliver Twist

TY - JOUR

T1 - I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!

T2 - Negotiating Nancy, hyperauthenticity and hyperfidelity in the 2007 BBC adaptation of Oliver Twist

AU - Poore, Benjamin

PY - 2010/9/1

Y1 - 2010/9/1

N2 - Inspired by the fresh impetus given to debates about fidelity at the Cultures of Translation conference (June 2008, Cardiff), this essay looks at the BBC Oliver Twist in the wider context of adaptations of the novel, and of history on television. The essay suggests that there is no ‘true’ Nancy to which adaptations can be faithful or otherwise, but rather a series of overlapping and sometimes contradictory discourses which we, in our assumptions of ‘realism’ in Dickens’ early novels, try to read as a rounded individual. Exploring the ways in which adaptations since the early years of cinema have tried to create Nancys with ‘interiority’, I consider the influence of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and argue that when adaptations such as the BBC’s present a social-realist,‘historical’ Nancy, they are both reacting against, and drawing on, Bart’s success as well as on contemporary televisual notions of history.

AB - Inspired by the fresh impetus given to debates about fidelity at the Cultures of Translation conference (June 2008, Cardiff), this essay looks at the BBC Oliver Twist in the wider context of adaptations of the novel, and of history on television. The essay suggests that there is no ‘true’ Nancy to which adaptations can be faithful or otherwise, but rather a series of overlapping and sometimes contradictory discourses which we, in our assumptions of ‘realism’ in Dickens’ early novels, try to read as a rounded individual. Exploring the ways in which adaptations since the early years of cinema have tried to create Nancys with ‘interiority’, I consider the influence of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and argue that when adaptations such as the BBC’s present a social-realist,‘historical’ Nancy, they are both reacting against, and drawing on, Bart’s success as well as on contemporary televisual notions of history.

U2 - 10.1386/jafp.3.2.157_1

DO - 10.1386/jafp.3.2.157_1

M3 - Article

SN - 1753-6421

VL - 3

SP - 157

EP - 170

JO - Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance

JF - Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance

IS - 2

ER -