An Aesthetic-Comparison Study Of The Text And Film Version Of Pride And Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, the representative work of Jane Austen, is not only very popular at the time of its publication, but also gives the current readers particular artistic enjoyment, thus becoming one of the hottest film adaptation sources. Since 1938, it has been adapted into films or TV serials for ten times.This thesis is going to make a research on the 2005 film version, which is also the newest one, of Pride and Prejudice. As to this version, different people have different views. Some speak highly of it, while others hold the view that it has made too many changes and is not faithful to the original novel. This argument reflects a hot topic, "resemblance" and "lack of resemblance" of the film with the original work, in film adaptation studies. This thesis insists that, just because novel and film are two different arts with different features, it's impossible for the film being completely faithful to the original novel, and on the contrary, film should be the valuable result of an artistic recreation on the basis of the original novel.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the reasons for choosing this topic and the significance of making this research. Chapter two is the theory part with a review of the relevant theories concerning film adaptation and aesthetics. Chapter three figures out the differences, those which have been mentioned as "lack of resemblance", between the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice and its original novel. Chapter four makes a comparative study of novel and film from the perspective of aesthetics, trying to make clear about their similarity, which is the aesthetic basis of the feasibility of film adaptation, and their differences, which are the aesthene reasons for those changes occurring in the 2005 film version, thus reinforcing the impossibility of the complete faithfulness of a film to its original text. This thesis concludes, in the fifth chapter, that film adaptation should not be the mechanical transformation from one art to another, but should be a process of artistic recreation on the basis of the original novel.