ABSTRACT
If film adaptations found some aesthetic recognition thanks to the elevation of cinema to the rank of ‘art’ in recent years, TV programmes of this kind are still being largely disregarded by scholars. According to Sarah Cardwell, there has not been to date ‘any sustained attempt to distinguish television adaptations as a distinct form or genre [and] “Television aesthetics” have been neglected, brushed aside or reviled in the field of television studies for too long’ (Cardwell, 2002: 1-4). Moreover, even when British and American television adaptations of ‘classic’ novels composed by writers such as Charles Dickens and Jane Austen have received attention from such scholarship as Sue Parrill’s Jane Austen on Film and Television (2002) and Robert Giddings’s The Classic Novel from Page to Screen (2000), international TV adaptations of the same kind have not been studied at all. This is a great pity as the study of these programmes could contribute in a major way to tracing the origins of television as a medium, and literary adaptations with it.
