What is this thing called a prospectus anyway?

Day one. Well, is it really? Last week I made the decision to specialize in the Victorian novel, at least in my dissertation. I want to look at popular novels and their film adaptations. This, ideally, will maintain all of my interests in science fiction/the supernatural and film while still picking up on a trend in the field (to go beyond the classic realist novel and expand the canon of Victorian Literature). So here are ideas floating around in my head right now. The challenge henceforth is to connect them all in a coherent and argumentative way.

realism
narration
novel vs. film (and the ways in which those two forms deal with realism and narration)
the supernatural and realism
the novel as a genre (and how popular "novellas" add to this genre once we stop segregating them)

Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone and The Woman in White
HG Wells - The Invisible Man and The Time Machine
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (Hound of the Baskervilles in particular?)
Charles Dickens - Bleak House....but this would be a "control" text because most critics already count Dickens in the canon but he's also included in the Gothic/sensation fiction category

satellite texts include: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Eliot's Middlemarch

A possible title I came up with today:

Epistemology, realism, and the supernatural in Victorian popular fiction

This doesn't really even hint that film will be involved, though. Dang.