Publications List
Below is an alphabetical list (by title) of publications that we have announced on the home page. To advertise your publication, please contact our webmaster, James Fleury at fleury.james@gmail.com.
Adaptable TV
This book focuses on the significantly under-explored relationship between televisual culture and adaptation studies in what is now commonly regarded as the ‘Golden Age’ of contemporary TV drama. Adaptable TV: Rewiring the Text does not simply concentrate on traditional types of adaptation, such as reboots, remakes and sequels, but broadens the scope of enquiry to examine a diverse range of experimental adaptive types that are emerging within an ever-changing TV landscape. With a particular focus on the serial narrative form, and with case studies that include Penny Dreadful, Fargo, The Night Of and Orange is the New Black, this study is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the complex interplay between television studies and adaptation studies.
Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
In Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Shelley Cobb explores film adaptations directed by women (often working with women screenwriters, producers, and sometimes editors) that foreground the figure of the female author.
Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige
This book explores the intersection between adaptation studies and what James F. English has called the “economy of prestige,” which includes formal prize culture as well as less tangible expressions such as canon formation, fandom, authorship, and performance. The chapters explore how prestige can affect many facets of the adaptation process, including selection, approach, and reception. The first section of this volume deals directly with cycles of influence involving prizes such as the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, and other major awards. The second section focuses on the juncture where adaptation, the canon, and awards culture meet, while the third considers alternative modes of locating and expressing prestige through adapted and adaptive intertexts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of adaptation, cultural sociology, film, and literature.
Adaptations in the Franchise Era
Kyle Meikle’s Adaptations in the Franchise Era re-evaluates adaptation’s place in a popular culture marked by the movement of content and audiences across more media borders than ever before. While adaptation has historically been understood as the transfer of stories from one medium to another-more often than not, from novel to film-the growing interconnectedness of media and media industries in the early twenty-first century raises new questions about the form and function of adaptation as both a product and a process. Where does adaptation fit within massive franchises that span pages, stages, screens, and theme parks?
Adaptations in the Sound Era
Focusing on promotional materials, Adaptations in the Sound Era tracks early attempts to promote sound through the elevation of words in adaptations in the early sound period.
Adapting Endings From Book to Screen: Last Pages, Last Shots
This book offers a new perspective on adaptation of books to the screen; by focusing on endings, new light is shed on this key facet of film and television studies. The authors look at a broad range of case studies from different genres, eras, countries and formats to analyse literary and cinematic traditions, technical considerations and ideological issues involved in film and television adaptions.
Adapting the Canon Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation
Adapting the Canon (2020) brings together some of the most recent and exciting research in the growing field of adaptation studies, charting the passage of canonical texts across time, cultures and different media.
Balzac Reframed: The Classical and Modern Faces of Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette
This book examines the theoretical affiliations between the most notable proponent of literary realism, Honoré de Balzac, and two understated but key representatives of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. It argues that their film criticism, which gradually led to the establishment of a common aesthetic vision of cinema (the “politique des auteurs”), owes more to Balzac and the nineteenth-century novel than to any intellectual trend of the immediate post-war period. By considering the films of Rohmer and Rivette as an extension of their writings (essays, film reviews, scriptwriting, novels and interviews), this volume analyses the changing and sometimes opposed ways in which they applied Balzacian principles and themes to their cinematic practice. Essentially, it understands the exchange between art forms, past traditions and contemporaneous currents as the overlooked yet common thread that links these three authors, through their own re-appropriations of classical and romantic aesthetics in their explorations of modern French society. In doing so, this study provides further nuance to the “conservative” versus “progressist” rupture that is generally assumed between the two directors, and offers an innovative reading of The Human Comedy in the light of post-war ideas on authorship, film adaptation, classicism and modernism.
The Comic Book Film Adaptation
From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (University Press of Mississippi) is the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production.
A Companion to the Biopic
The biopic, often viewed as the most reviled of all film genres, traces its origins to the early silent era over a century ago. Receiving little critical attention, biopics are regularly dismissed as superficial, formulaic, and disrespectful of history. Film critics, literary scholars and historians tend to believe that biopics should be artistic, yet accurate, true-to-life representations of their subjects. Moviegoing audiences, however, do not seem to hold similar views; biopics continue to be popular, commercially viable films. Even the genre’s most ardent detractors will admit that these films are often very watchable, particularly due to the performance of the lead actor. It is increasingly common for stars of biographical films to garner critical praise and awards, driving a growing interest in scholarship in the genre.
Expanding Adaptation Networks
Kate Newell’s Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization addresses print-based modes of adaptation that have not conventionally been theorized as adaptations—such as novelization, illustration, literary maps, pop-up books, and ekphrasis. It discusses a broad range of image and word-based adaptations of popular literary works, among them The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Daisy Miller, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Moby Dick, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The study reveals that commercial and franchise works and ephemera play a key role in establishing a work’s iconography. Newell argues that the cultural knowledge and memory of a work is constructed through reiterative processes and proposes a network-based model of adaptation to explain this. Whereas most adaptation studies prioritize film and television, this book’s focus on print invites new entry points for the study of adaptation.
Les Misérables and Its Afterlives
Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, this collection offers analysis of both the novel itself and its adaptations. In spite of a mixed response from critics, Les Misérables instantly became a global bestseller. Since its successful publication over 150 years ago, it has traveled across different countries, cultures, and media, giving rise to more than 60 international film and television variations, numerous radio dramatizations, animated versions, comics, and stage plays. Most famously, it has inspired the world’s longest running musical, which itself has generated a wealth of fan-made and online content. Whatever its form, Hugo’s tale of social injustice and personal redemption continues to permeate the popular imagination.
Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny
Julie Grossman’s Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity appropriates Mary Shelley’s metaphor for her book Frankenstein, ‘hideous progeny,’ for adaptation studies. Like the Creature made and then rejected because of its perceived misshapenness, adaptations are often reviled because they offer new perspectives on treasured works of art. Instead of seeing adaptations as looking back to previous works they are re-visioning, we might more usefully conceive of adaptations as looking forward, as they stretch familiar texts into new forms with new cultural resonances.
The Making of… Adaptation and the Cultural Imaginary
This book explores “Making of” sites as a genre of cultural artefact. Moving beyond “making-of” documentaries, the book analyses novels, drama, film, museum exhibitions and popular studies that re-present the making of culturally loaded film adaptations. It argues that the “Making of” genre operates on an adaptive spectrum, orienting towards and enacting the adaptation of films and their making. The book examines the behaviours that characterise “Making of” sites across visual media; it explores the cultural work done by these sites, why recognition of “Making of” sites as adaptations matters, and why our conception of adaptation matters. Part one focuses on the adaptive domain presented by the “Making of” John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Part two attends to “Making of” Gone with the Wind sites, and concludes with “Making of” The Lord of the Rings texts as the acme of the cultural risks and investments charted in earlier chapters.
Neo-Victorianism on Screen
This book broadens the scope of inquiry of neo-Victorian studies by focusing primarily on screen adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture. More specifically, this monograph spotlights the overlapping yet often conflicting drives at work in representations of Victorian heroines in contemporary film and TV. Primorac’s close analyses of screen representations of Victorian women pay special attention to the use of costume and clothes, revealing the tensions between diverse theoretical interventions and generic (often market-oriented) demands. The author elucidates the push and pull between postcolonial critique and nostalgic, often Orientalist spectacle; between feminist textual interventions and postfeminist media images. Furthermore, this book examines neo-Victorianism’s relationship with postfeminist media culture and offers an analysis of the politics behind onscreen treatment of Victorian gender roles, family structures, sexuality, and colonial space.
The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies
This collection of forty new essays, written by the leading scholars in adaptation studies and distinguished contributors from outside the field, is the most comprehensive volume on adaptation ever published. Written to appeal alike to specialists in adaptation, scholars in allied fields, and general readers, it hearkens back to the foundations of adaptation studies a century and more ago, surveys its ferment of activity over the past twenty years, and looks forward to the future.
Patricia Highsmith on Screen
This book is the first full-length study to focus on the various film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novels, which have been a popular source for adaptation since Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1952). The collection of essays examines films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Two Faces of January, and Carol, includes interviews with Highsmith adaptors and provides a comprehensive filmography of all existing Highsmith adaptations. Particular attention is paid to queer subtexts, mythological underpinnings, philosophical questioning, contrasting media environments and formal conventions in diverse generic contexts. Produced over the space of seventy years, these adaptations reflect broad cultural and material shifts in film production and critical approaches to film studies. The book is thus not only of interest to Highsmith admirers but to anyone interested in adaptation and transatlantic film history.
The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology
This book brings together a broad range of scholarly approaches to the challenges and opportunities of adaptation studies in this new era. Together, they focus on the political and ideological tensions that underlie and shape processes of adaptation and cultural transformation in the age of media convergence.
Queer/Adaptation
This collection of essays illuminates the intersection of queer and adaptation. Both adaptation and queerness suffer from the stereotype of being secondary: to identify something as an adaptation is to recognize it in relation to something else that seems more original, more authentic. Similarly, to identify something as queer is to place it in relation to what is assumed to be “normal” or “straight.” This ground-breaking volume brings together fifteen original essays that critically challenge these assumptions about originality, authenticity, and value. The volume is organized in three parts: The essays in Part I examine what happens when an adaptation queers its source text and explore the role of the author/screenwriter/director in making those choices. The essays in Part II look at what happens when filmmakers push against boundaries of various kinds: time and space, texts and bodies, genres and formats. And the essays in Part III explore adaptations whose source texts cannot be easily pinned down, where there are multiple adaptations, and where the adaptation process itself is queer. The book includes discussion of a wide variety of texts, including opera, classic film, genre fiction, documentary, musicals, literary fiction, low-budget horror, camp classics, and experimental texts, providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad ways in which queer and adaptation overlap.
Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama
This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Modern Irish Literature and the Irish cinema, with twelve chapters written by experts in the field that deal with principal films, authors, and directors. This survey outlines the influence of screen adaptation of important texts from the national literature on the construction of an Irish cinema, many of whose films because of cultural constraints were produced and exhibited outside the country until very recently.
Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the contemporary representation of the author on screen. It does this through two main approaches: by looking at how biographies of well-known authors in Western culture have been adapted onto the film and television screen; and by examining the wider preoccupation with the idea of what the ‘author persona’ means in broader economic, cultural, industrial, and ideological terms. Drawing from current debates about the uses of the heritage industry and conventions of the Hollywood biopic and celebrity culture, this book re-frames the analysis of the author on screen in contemporary culture and theorises it under its own unique genre: the ‘literary biopic’. With case studies including adaptations of the biographies and cultural personas of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Allen Ginsberg—to name a few–this book examines how and why the author continues to be a prominent screen and cultural preoccupation.
Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age
This book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of ‘Shakespearean’ individuals, groups and communities and their ‘online’ presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as ‘Shakespearean’ is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of ‘Shakespearean’ actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and ‘highbrow’) but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Shakespearean Celebrity moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare’s contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.
Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom
This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeare’s place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans’ practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeare’s Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works.
Subversive Adaptations
This book deals with film adaptations of literary works created in Communist Czechoslovakia between 1954 and 1969, such as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne(Zeman 1958), Marketa Lazarová (Vláčil 1967), and The Joke (Jireš 1969). Bubeníček treats a historically significant period around which myths and misinformation have arisen. The book is broad in scope and examines aesthetic, political, social, and cultural issues. It sets out to disprove the notion that the state-controlled film industry behind the Iron Curtain produced only aesthetically uniform works pandering to official ideology. Bubeníček’s main aim is to show how the political situation of Communist Czechoslovakia moulded the film adaptations created there, but also how these same works, in turn, shaped the sociocultural conditions of the 1950s and the 1960s.
Teaching Adaptations
This volume looks at the ways in which adaptations can and have been taught by leading academics in the field of Adaptation Studies from all over the world. While aware that Shakespeare and canonical literature remain the mainstay of adaptation study in English, Teaching Adaptations addresses the challenges and appeal of teaching popular fiction and culture, video games and new media content, which serve to enrich the curriculum, as well as exploit the changing methods by which English students read and consume literary and screen texts. The volume is structured to appeal to both those who are considering teaching adaptations for the first time as well as those who are familiar with key perspectives in adaptation criticism.
Theorizing Adaptation
From intertextuality to postmodern cultural studies, narratology to affect theory, poststructuralism to metamodernism, and postcolonialism to ecocriticism, humanities adaptation studies has engaged with a host of contemporary theories. Yet theorizing adaptation has been declared behind the theoretical times compared to other fields and charged with theoretical incorrectness by scholars from all theoretical camps. In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kamilla Elliott works to explain and redress the problem of theorizing adaptation.
True Event Adaptation
These essays all—in various ways—address the relationship between adaptation, “true events,” and cultural memory. They ask (and frequently answer) the question: how do we script stories about real events that are often still fresh in our memories and may involve living people? True Event Adaptation: Scripting Real Lives contains essays from scholars committed to interrogating historical and current hard-hitting events, traumas, and truths through various media. Each essay goes beyond general discussion of adaptation and media to engage with the specifics of adapting true life events—addressing pertinent and controversial questions around scriptwriting, representation, ethics, memory, forms of history, and methodological interventions. Written for readers interested in how memory works on culture as well as screenwriting choices, the collection offers new perspectives on historical media and commercial media that is currently being produced, as well as on media created by the book’s contributors themselves.
Women’s Lives on Screen (from the European Journal of Life Writing)
This cluster of articles aims to push the study of women’s biopics in new directions by considering the genre as a dynamic and malleable frame ‘mattering’ herstories in multiply contingent ways. For this purpose, it has brought together a cross-disciplinary ensemble of eleven articles looking at a diverse range of cinematic and televisual biopics from France, Great Britain, Sri Lanka, United States, and the Iranian diaspora, which lend themselves to critique from an intersectional gender perspective.
Wuthering Heights on Film and Television
Emily Brontë’s beloved novel Wuthering Heights has been adapted countless times for film and television over the decades. Valérie V. Hazette offers here a historical and transnational study of those adaptations, presenting the afterlife of the book as a series of cultural journeys that focus as much on the readers, film-makers, and viewers as on the dramas themselves. Taking in the British silent film; French, Mexican, and Japanese versions; the British television serials; and more, this richly theoretical volume is the first comprehensive global analysis of the adaptation of Wuthering Heights for film and television.