This study is based on Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park and its film adaptation. Novels and their adaptations are narrative texts that find themselves in constant dialogue with earlier literary and filmic texts, as well as other numerous contemporary narrative and genre conventions. Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes have demonstrated through the concepts of 'intertextuality', that each new literary text is 'shot through' with a multiplicity of voices and other literary works known consciously or unconsciously by readers and writers alike. The 1999 film adaptation interprets the novel from the perspective of recent literary criticism. I will discuss how the film reflects the influence of scholars who have read the novel as a reflection of Austen's abolitionist and feminist sympathies. I will also trace what effect the distinct directorial control maintained by the director has on the final outcome of the adaptation. |