William Trevor’s Screen Fictions: "No Interest. Not Suitable for Treatment"

This essay contests the view that Trevor's work for the screen is somehow secondary to his many and notable accomplishments as a novelist and short-story writer. Instead, it suggest that his career demonstrates the pervasive inter-connections between these different forms, and that this might be linked to his successful adaptation not only to life in England but to thriving professionally across these media. The essay calls for a re-alignment from the exclusive literary-critical approach that has dominated assessments of Trevor as a writer, which can be seen as an obstacle to a fully rounded evaluation of his career. It offers instead an approach to his work for television that combines the historical consideration of his TV archive, textual analysis of televisual form and contemporary theories about 'adaptation', taking its cue from Deborah Cartmell's injunction to 'distance adaptation studies from fidelity criticism'.