Mediated Utopias: From Literature to Cinema

Artur Blaim is Professor of English Literature at the University of Gdańsk. He is the author of Gazing in Useless Wonder. English Utopian Fictions, 1516-1800 (2013) and other books on early English utopias. He edited several volumes on literary studies and utopian cinema.Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Gdańsk. She published books on 20th-century literature and co-edited, together with Artur Blaim, Imperfect Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (2011) as well as Spectres of Utopia (2012).

• Contents: Artur Blaim/Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim: On Utopia, Adaptation, and Utopian Film Analysis – Justyna Galant: H.G. Wells’s and Cameron Menzies’s Things To Come: A Neurotic Utopia of Progress – Katarzyna Pisarska: The «Speaking Picture»: Frank Capra’s Adaptation of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon – Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: Visualizing the «Shadow World»: Dystopian Reality in the Film Adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four – Artur Blaim: «As if it wasn’t a good island»: Failed and Forgotten Utopias in the Cinematic Adaptations of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk: The World in (Dis)harmony: Yevgeni Sherstobitov’s The Andromeda Nebula – Grzegorz Maziarczyk: Between the Scylla of Estrangement and the Charybdis of Naturalisation: Two Television Adaptations of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – Zofia Kolbuszewska: From Philip K. Dick’s Dystopian World to Hollywood Utopian Vision: «We Can Remember It for You Wholesale», Wunderkammer, Memory and Total Recall – Barbara Klonowska: From Ideal Community to the Land of Cockayne: Redefining Utopia in The Secret Garden by Agnieszka Holland – Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim: Dystopian Topography of Noise: «Harrison Bergeron» by Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Pittman, and Chandler Tuttle – Marta Komsta: Parts Unknown: Strategies of Disappropriation in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go.

«The range of works analyzed is so rich and covers such a substantial period of time in the history of cinema (from 1933 until the present), that the book is able to provide an outstanding perspective of the evolution of utopia/dystopia-inspired cinema and become a great source for researchers.» (Pere Gallardo-Torrano, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona)«Anyone who doubts that film adaptations can have their own artistic and intellectual integrity apart from their literary sources will find this volume enlightening. The authors of these essays demonstrate that, while film adaptations do sometimes denature their literary originals, others often distinctly improve on their originals, employing autonomous aesthetic principles and achieving new political and cultural relevance.» (John M. Krafft, Miami University, Ohio)