Foreign Parts: German and Austrian Actors on the British Stage 1933-1960
Richard Dove
Germanic Literatures 15•29 September 2017
- ‘Readers with high expectations will not be disappointed by Foreign Parts. It is a fascinating presentation of the careers of five actors who, forced to leave Germany and Austria by Hitler, set about plying their trade on the stage in Britain... Dove’s account of the actors’ careers in pre-war and wartime Britain is exemplary.’ — Anthony Grenville, AJR Journal 2018
- ‘The stories that unfold are engaging when viewed as biographies, because of the different challenges and problems each of the actors had to confront. Their different treatment when Britain decided to intern ‘enemy aliens’ reflects the chaotic and sometimes extreme nature of wartime bureaucracy, and their choices after the war are fascinating, with only Mannheim choosing to return to Germany.’ — David Barnett, Modern Language Review 114.2, April 2019, 411-12 (full text online)
Zola and the Art of Television: Adaptation, Recreation, Translation
Kate Griffiths
Transcript 3•28 September 2020
- ‘There is a lot of good material in Zola and the Art of Television. Its readings of Zola’s novels and short stories, especially in relation to their adaptations, are fresh, detailed, and nuanced. Electing to address television adaptations rather than film brings more attention to this more under-researched form of adaptation.’ — Jonathan Evans, Translation and Literature 30, 2021, 243-48 (full text online)
- ‘Griffiths breaks new ground here in two ways which she explains in detail in her introduction. First, her focus on television adaptations ends what she calls the “critical silence” (p. 7) in this area by challenging viewers’ and scholars’ tendency to underappreciate both the artistry and the critical significance of televisual adaptation. Secondly, Griffiths convincingly argues that a deep understanding of creative processes and practices can be gained from treating televisual rewritings of literary texts as translations rather than (or as well as) adaptations; for her, reading these televisual texts through the lens of various translation theories opens up extremely fruitful modes of interpretation and ultimately calls for a reconsideration of what televisual art is or could be. By challenging adaptation studies’ traditional resistance to translation theory, Griffiths’s book importantly goes some way to bridging the intellectual and disciplinary divide between literary studies and media studies... As well as’ — Hannah Thompson, H-France 21.190, October 2021, 190
- ‘Through her judiciously selected corpus, her appropriation of adaptation theory, and her ambitious but cogently articulated arguments, Griffiths’s groundbreaking study succeeds in demonstrating how these adaptations encourage viewers to reflect on television’s own technological, aesthetic, ideological, and commercial metamorphoses. Furthermore, Griffiths clearly demonstrates that, by probing the relationship between art and contemporary society, television has simultaneously lent continuity to Zola’s goals and renewed relevance to his texts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.’ — Barry Nevin, French Studies online, 26 July 2022 (full text online)
Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television
Paul Julian Smith
Moving Image 1•1 June 2012
Reimagining History in Contemporary Spanish Media: Theater, Cinema, Television, Streaming
Paul Julian Smith
Visual Culture 1•10 December 2021