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Solomon (J.) Ben-Hur. The Original Blockbuster . Pp. xviii + 910, colour ills. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press , 2016. Paper, £29.99, US$44.95 (Cased, £105, US$162). ISBN: 978-1-4744-0795-3 (978-1-4744-0794-6 hbk).
Reviews
This volume is an impeccably researched history of Lew Wallace's novel, Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ, from its inception in the 1870s through the stage and screen adaptations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to early twenty-first-century versions across a range of media (though not including the 2016 film, which had not been released when the book went to press). S. convincingly argues throughout that Ben-Hur was a 'phenomenon', with the popular novel earning shrewd businessman Wallace unprecedented remuneration from book sales and theatrical royalties, and spawning a myriad of uses of the Ben-Hur name for products and services. In an era when Game of Thrones is often described as a 'phenomenon', with the success of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels and the HBO television series supported globally by digital media, the large-scale success of Ben-Hur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when large advertising budgets and global networks did not exist, is all the more phenomenal. Although the history of Ben-Hur is primarily an American history, S. also includes the impact of the novel and adaptations in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He demonstrates the important legacy of a book that has received less critical attention than other contemporary novels that have had a less wide-ranging afterlife. The material that S. has amassed on all aspects of Ben-Hur is in itself phenomenal, clearly the product of years of painstaking research.
One word of warning to readers who come to this volume with a primary interest in films about the Classical world, rather than receptions in advertising, music and stage productions: although part of the EUP Screening Antiquity series, S. does not come to the two major twentieth-century film versions of Ben-Hur from 1925 and 1959 until over halfway through the volume (p. 561)....