Conrad’s “Amy Foster” and its film adaptation, Beeban Kidron’s Swept from the Sea, tell the story of a cross-cultural encounter in a closed ethnocentric community. Yanko, a young man from the East Carpathians, is supposed to reformulate a new identity at the intersection of his native discourse and the new dominant discourse in England. In both the original story and the film, Yanko fails to find such an intersection as this closed community defines its members against the background of their ethnic background, and grants recognition or denies it on this principle. The differences in the film adaptation add to the richness of the original story by digging up certain details from Amy’s perspective. This paper aims to offer a contrastive analysis of their cases, not from the center, but from the edges: one from Yanko’s and the other from Amy’s wing against the backdrop of the shifting perspective in narration.
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