Sarah Cardwell

One of Britain's foremost TV practitioners, Andrew Davies is the creator of programmes such as 'A Very Peculiar Practice', 'To Serve Them All My Days', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Othello' and 'The Way We Live Now'. Although best known for his adaptations of the work of writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, he has written numerous original drama series, single plays, films, stage plays and books. This volume offers a critical appraisal of Davies’s work, and assesses his contribution to British television.Cardwell also explores the conventional notions of authorship and auteurism which are challenged by Davies’s work. Can we identify Davies as the author of the varied texts attributed to him? If so, does an awareness of his authorial role aid our interpretation and evaluation of those texts? How does the phenomenon of adaptation affect the issue of authorship? How important is ‘the author’ to television? This book will appeal to both an academic readership, and to the many people who have taken pleasure in Davies’s work.

Offers a critical reappraisal of a prolific and popular genre, as well as bringing new material into the broader field of Television Studies. Surveys the traditional discourses about adaptation, unearthing the unspoken assumptions and common misconceptions that underlie them and explores the problems inherent in previous approaches, developing an original perspective that considers the particularly televisual nature of this genre. Examines four major British serials: 'Brideshead Revisited', 'Pride and Prejudice', 'Moll Flanders', and 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' revealing the genre's importance in constituting and moderating our understanding of the past and of television itself. The first sustained and coherent book on the subject in almost a decade.