Virginia Woolf and cinema : Adaptations of Mrs Dalloway.

This thesis proposes a return to the issue of fidelity criticism in adaptation studies through a detailed consideration of the adaptations of Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway (1925). Within adaptation studies the issue of fidelity and the role of the source novel have been relegated to the sidelines in response to a logophilic prejudice which dominated early studies, and as a consequence intertextuality and genre have become more pronounced. I redress this negation of the source text, theorising new ways of conceiving of the source-adaptation relationship. I explicitly focus upon source-associated intertextualities to illustrate how a return to fidelity can open up a plethora of readings rather than close them down. In doing so the importance of the source text is foregrounded, as it is through the source that these intertexts are introduced, whilst demonstrating that two seemingly exclusive approaches to adaptation can be married in what I term a "web of intertextuality".I develop Gerard Genette's theory of stylistic imitation in order to theorise how an adaptation may develop a relationship with its source based on rhetoric, or style. I consider how Marleen Gorris'Mrs Dalloway (1997) adapts Woolfs literary impressionism through the use of the visual (editing and framing) as well as the aural, including the verbal (voice-over) and the non-verbal (the scored soundtrack). My analysis of The Hours, both Michael Cunningham's novel (1998) and Stephen Daldry's film (2002), examines how both texts develop a stylistic relationship with Woolfs novel through the presence of other Woolf intertexts such as her fiction (The Waves), her literary criticism ("Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown"), as well as her autobiographical writings. I address the diverse nature of intertextuality as I analyse alternative intertexts such as the cultural iconicity of Virginia Woolf and the figure of the hysteric. I consider how the merging of fiction, biography and cultural iconicity influences adaptation and its critical reception, promoting an on-going dialogue across the multiple texts present. The thesis found that a reclamation of the source novel and a return to fidelity produced a new means of conceiving of adaptation that incorporated both the source text and intertextuality which, through the web of intertextuality, presented an open, non-linear and potentially limitless way of reading adaptation.