“I came a long way to get here”: Narrative point of view, the trope of the journey and recontextualization in Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster and its cinematic adaptation
Abstract
The main theoretical aim of this article is to analyze the ways in which the narrative discourse and thematic concerns of Kaye Gibbons’s best-selling novel Ellen Foster (1987), the literary original, are creatively re-worked in a different medium—its cinematic adaptation, the Hallmark Hall of Fame film. Therefore, I seek to show how the narrative point of view of the novel Ellen Foster is transcoded to the film of the same name, and to what degree the thematic concerns of the literary precursor find their way into a different medium. I will also analyze the final words uttered by the narrator within the rhetoric and narrative logic of both media to see whether they are consistent with the cultural discourse the texts are engaged in.
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