Literary Women on the Screen

The Representation of Women in Films Based on Imaginative Literature

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Professor Christensen’s insightful study is an original piece of research that contributes to our understanding of film adaptations and what happens when women characters in literary texts become women characters in films.The method – to do detailed comparative analyses of eight novels/films, two each from the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s, and two directed by women – enables one to get a sense of how adaptations have changed over time without sacrificing the meticulous analysis that is necessary to conduct a close comparison of how characters are represented in novels and films.In addition, Professor Christensen’s clear normative position – the Christian feminism specifically defined in the introduction – informs her analyses and leads at times to fresh, new, challenging positions.