Yuchen Zhou

From Barbara to Barbara: Exploring the dialogue of cross-cultural adaptation through adaptation practice

Bournemouth University, UK

With the invention of movies, stories told in words are finally being brought to the audience
in the form of moving images. A study commissioned by the Publishers Association and
produced by Frontier Economics in 2018 claims that film adaptations based on literature
achieve higher box office than films from original screenplays. The success of film
adaptations in the film market has led filmmakers to no longer be satisfied with producing
film adaptations based on literary works from their cultural backgrounds; cross-cultural film
adaptations are also seeing an increasingly popular trend. Hollywood adapted Chinese
characters Mulan and Kung Fu Panda; both of them have achieved amazing box office.
However, adapting foreign literature is not exclusive to the Western world; China has a long
history of adapting Western literature. During the last century, 57 Chinese films have been
based on Western literature, while 12 of them are based on British literature. They not only
evidenced the developing maturity of Chinese film production technology but also witnessed
the localisation of British literature in China through filmmaking.

How might contemporary screenwriting practice be used to explore adapting British literature
into a Chinese cultural context? This paper will take the well-known British novelist Thomas
Hardy’s short story, Barbara of the House of Grebe, as an example and develop a
transnational adaptation script that “conveys the essence” (Hutcheon 2012) of the author’s
original text. By analysing the process of relocating key elements, such as themes, plots,
settings, background and characters, to explore the dialogue of cross-cultural adaptation of
how British stories are transposed into the Chinese cultural domain.

Yuchen is a PGR (PhD candidate) in the Department of Media Production, Faculty of Media
& Communication at Bournemouth University, her research mainly focuses on Chinese film
adaptations based on British literature. Yuchen is also highly interested in the areas of
filmmaking and scriptwriting, she completed her MA film directing course at Bournemouth
University in 2022 and her short film Feeling Good Tonight (director, coscreenwriter) has
been selected by the Infinity Film Festival (2023).