Dickens in Twenty-first century India: A Study of the Novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup and its film adaptation by Danny Boyle

Nathalie Vanfasse (1)

1 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone

When Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s début novel Q & A, published in 2005, was released worldwide in 2008 as Slumdog Millionaire, many critics and viewers harped on its Dickensian overtones, but so far no thorough analysis of the novel and its adaptation has really substantiated this claim. This article identifies Dickensian influences in the novel and its adaptation, and it tries to work out why Swarup and Boyle resorted to these allusions. In so doing, it shows that Dickensian allusions, primarily aimed at promoting the reception of these two twenty-first-century works, have led to contradictory and even incompatible, but nonetheless extremely relevant interpretations of the novel and its cinematic adaptation.

Mots clés: Dickens; Slumdog Millionaire

Domaines: Littératures

Nathalie Vanfasse. Dickens in Twenty-first century India: A Study of the Novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup and its film adaptation by Danny Boyle. Etudes Anglaises, 2012, 65. ⟨hal-01202196⟩