Body Double explores the myriad ways that film artists have represented the creative process. In this highly innovative work, Lucy Fischer draws on a neglected element of auteur studies to show that filmmakers frequently raise questions about the paradoxes of authorship by portraying  the onscreen writer. Dealing with such varied topics as the icon of the typewriter, the case of the writer/director, the authoress, and the omnipresent infirm author, she probes the ways in which films can tell a plausible story while contemplating the conditions and theories of their making.

By examining many forms of cinema, from Hollywood and the international art cinema to the avant-garde, Fischer considers the gender, age, and mental or physical health of fictionalized writers; the dramatized interaction between artists and their audiences and critics; and the formal play of written words and nonverbal images.

By analyzing such movies as Adaptation,Diary of a Country Priest, Naked Lunch, American Splendor, and Irezumi, Fischer tracks the parallels between film author and character, looking not for the creative figure who stands outside the text, but for the one who stands within it as corporeal presence and alter-ego.

Some of the earliest feature films were derived from classic literature. Even today, most of the movies we see are adaptations of one kind or another. People who have never read Jane Austen can see her characters on the screen; but filmgoers can also see material taken from theater, television, comic books, and every other medium.

The essays in this volume, most of which have never before been published, raise fundamental questions about cinema and adaptation: what is the nature of the "literary" and the "cinematic"? Why do so many of the

films described as adaptions seem to derive from canonical literature rather than from other sources? How do the different media affect the ways stories are told?

Film Adaptation offers fresh approaches to the art, theory, and cultural politics of movie adaptations, even challenging what is meant by the term "adaptation" itself. Contributors examine the process of adaptation in both theory and practice, discussing a wide variety of films. James Naremore's introduction provides an accessible historical overview of the field and reveals the importance of adaptation study to the many different academic disciplines now attracted to the analysis of film as commodity, document, and cultural artifact.

(Contributors are André Bazin, Dudley Andrew, Robert B. Ray, Robert Stam, Richard Maltby, Guerric DeBona, O. M. B., Gilberto Perez, Michael Anderegg, Matthew Bernstein, Darlene J. Sadlier, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Lesley Stern.)

Ranging from cinematic images of Jane Austen's estates to Oscar Wilde's drawing rooms, Dianne F. Sadoff looks at popular heritage films, often featuring Hollywood stars, that have been adapted from nineteenth-century novels.

Victorian Vogue argues that heritage films perform different cultural functions at key historical moments in the twentieth century. According to Sadoff, they are characterized by a double historical consciousness-one that is as attentive to the concerns of the time of production as to those of the Victorian period. If James Whale's Frankenstein and Tod Browning's Dracula exploited post-Depression fear in the 1930s, the horror films of the 1950s used the genre to explore homosexual panic, 1970s movies elaborated the sexuality only hinted at in the thirties, and films of the 1990s indulged the pleasures of consumption.

Taking a broad view of the relationships among film, literature, and current events, Sadoff contrasts films not merely with their nineteenth-century source novels but with crucial historical moments in the twentieth century, showing their cultural use in interpreting the present, not just the past.