History in Literary Adaptations

As signalled in Chapter 4, written and visual histories are different modes of approaching the past. Robert Rosenstone maintains that the main difference lies in the fact that academic history makes abstractions, and labels certain events or periods — for instance, ‘The Renaissance’, ‘the French Revolution’. Such tags and categorisations, he argues, tend to conceal as much as they reveal about the past: ‘Unlike the word, the filmic image cannot abstract or generalize’. Accordingly, ‘in this large gap between the abstract idea and the specific instance, the historical film finds the space to contest history, to interrogate either the metanarratives that structure historical knowledge, or smaller historical truths, received notions, conventional images’ (1995: 8; italics in original).