ABSTRACT
The conclusion examines the openness and creative richness of Dickens’s affective forms through film adaptations of Great Expectations. Surveying adaptations by David Lean (1946), Alfonso Cuarón (1998), and Mike Newell (2012), it situates their affective differences through their different historical, industrial, and medial contexts. The articulation of shame and contempt to precarity in the original text threads through each film to generate unexpected resonances between the adapted text and different conjunctures: a postwar British film made with limited resources evinces a desire to reclaim lost British military and economic power as cultural power; a 1990s Hollywood film transforms the novel into a teen popcorn flick that gives it an ideological twist suitable for a service economy premised on creative and intellectual production; and a British heritage film grapples with the affective landscape of the 2010s by presenting Pip as character without reflection or sense of futurity captured by his emotions of rage and humiliation.
