International audienceAfter having examined how Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is fundamentally structured by an interplay of norms and transgressions, I propose to look at two recent filmic adaptations, which fully appropriate the ambivalence of their source text: the 2003 queer adaptation Twist and the 2004 South African film Boy Called Twist. My paper not only takes into account the aesthetics of these two films but also looks at their contexts of production, showing how the ambivalent ideology of Dickens's novel can take on new meanings and be adapted for new purposes

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books, 1 they are "neo-Victorian" only in what Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss call a "soft" or "inclusive" sense (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2): in contrast with "strong" definitions, long predominant in academia, "which make self-reflexivity […] a conditio sine qua non of the neo-Victorian reference to the nineteenth century" (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2), neither of these games explicitly aims at challenging our conception of the past and the present by engaging us in self-reflexive and intellectually demanding representations. Rather, American McGee's Alice and Alice: Madness Returns rely on Victorian texts and tropes to create intensely "immersive" and "affective" experiences (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 3), likely to attract a broad audience. Thus, for instance, the two games contain a high level of gore and violence-which constituted an appealingly rare and controversial feature in 2000, and had, by the early 2010s, become an important selling point of many commercial action games. In both cases, the marketing campaigns designed by the publishing company, Electronic Arts, emphasised the games' horrific quality, promising the audience a viscerally thrilling plunge into nightmarish worlds. On the creative side, the developing teams were led by designer American McGee, who made it clear that he chose the Alice books as source material in order to exploit their Videogames' Specific Forms of Immersion into the Past, Present, and Future: E...

Résumé Les romans de Dickens sont peuplés d’une foule de marginaux parmi lesquels certains ont intégré l’imaginaire collectif depuis des générations. Bien qu’ayant vu le jour sous la contrainte de la décence victorienne, les déviants dickensiens laissent néanmoins dans l’imagination une empreinte profonde. C’est cette force-là qui a permis à ces personnages de subsister si longtemps et de se réincarner en une multitude d’avatars. Les héritiers des marginaux dickensiens sont nombreux, car ces figures ne se laissent décidément pas soumettre à une interprétation fermée ni à une explication catégorique — leur marginalité ne peut être réduite à un motif stable. L’esthétique de leur déviance est déjà sujette à des reconfigurations au sein des romans de Dickens ; par la suite, elle a été récupérée et adaptée à de nombreuses reprises. En s’appuyant sur trois des marginaux dickensiens les plus mémorables — Sikes, Fagin et Miss Havisham — cet article explorera comment la déviance dickensienne persiste tout en évoluant, au gré des média et des siècles.