Reviews 61 Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel , By Vivian Y. Kao Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN 9783030545796 (hardback); ISBN 9783030545802 (ebook) Click here to purchase Postcolonial Screen Adaptations and the British Novel attempts to use development theory or improvement ideology as the lens through which to re-read nineteenth-century classics of British fiction and their modern adaptations, thereby pointing out how they discover, critique and utilize tropes of anti-improvement inherent in those very texts to tackle the threats of Neo-Capitalism. The title itself of the introduction, “Adapting Improvement: Screen Afterlives of Nineteenth Century Progress”, outlines the scope of this book, which contests and questions the premise of development that “being bad at capitalism means being backward, stunted, imperfect and unfree” (3). It is divided into several sub-sections, which collectively seek to address the question how postcolonial film adaptations appropriate British fiction to speak of contemporary global power inequalities and colonial legacies, and to set up aggressive resistance. The works and philosophies of David Crocher, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum are used to disentangle development enmeshed in a discourse that chiefly caters to the interests of a Capitalist global economy. Each chapter ends with a detailed reference section and a list of films, discussed or mentioned, which certainly shows the level of research which has gone into this book. The book is divided into four chapters apart from the elaborately argued “Introduction”. The first chapter, “Improvement, Development, and Consumer Culture in Jane Austen and Popular Indian Cinema”, interestingly begins with a rebuttal of Edward Said’s claim, made in Culture and Imperialism, that nineteenth-century British novels perpetuated the imperial ideology which postcolonial studies must redress through contrapuntal readings. Kao, however, suggests that Jane Austen’s novels contain within them their own contrapuntal readings, moments and sub- plots (47). She uses the 1995 adaptation of Emma in “Clueless” and the Bollywood adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (“Bride and Prejudice”) and Emma (“Aisha”), to argue that both “Clueless” and the Bollywood adaptations are able to “make their source narratives speak to new historical realities” (60). In a very authoritative move, the book chooses to link this choice to the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century liberal ideologies of Macaulay and Mill, and later to that of the Utilitarians, and then from the British Orientalists to even modern-day Governments, which held onto and imposed upon Indians a particular idea of what progress was. Both the Indian popular films for instance, Kao points out, use the metaphor of shopping to reflect the retaliation of middle-class youth against a docile acceptance of a predestined future earmarked for them. Chapter Two, “Moral Management: Spaces of Domestication in Jane Eyre and I Walked With a Zombie”, focuses on the improvement ethic of the nineteenth century, contained in all Austen novels which, the author argues, originated in the Acts of Enclosure. These reached their peak during the Napoleonic Wars, forcing England to contract and “inwardly withdraw” from its