The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies: Adapting the Canon in Film, TV, Novels and Popular Culture

Abstract

What exactly do we mean when we refer to something as an adaptation? How, if at all, does the term adaptation differ from the process of adaptation? What are we adapting and why? Writing in The Guardian about the stage adaptation of his Booker-prize winning novel, Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie defines 'adaptation' in its broadest sense as 'translation, migration and metamorphosis, all the means by which one thing becomes another' - a process that 'goes beyond the realm of art into the rest of life: It is, notes Rushdie, all-encompassing - a natural and ongoing process that permeates our lives as well as our literature. However, the terms we apply to texts seen to adapt existing narratives are more problematic and less easy to define. Academic interest in the study of textual adaptation continues to grow and, like the texts themselves, to evolve. There are a number of acclaimed and highly complex publications, both theoretical and case study based, that explore the current status of Adaptation Studies. And yet, there is a conspicuous absence of publications aimed at providing readers with a comprehensive and accessible route to the study of literary adaptation in its widest sense. This study guide provides a clear overview of debates past and present and equips readers with an all-round introduction to the history and theory of Adaptation Studies. It offers a series of practical ways in to critiquing the processes which underpin literary adaptation and a range of creative approaches to the application of theory. While the majority of current publications take the adaptation of literature to screen as the focus for debate, we deal here with a number of canonical core texts and their adaptive 'journeys' not only into other media platforms like film but into other prose and performance-based forms. The text outlines the various approaches adaptations theorists have adopted over time and maps the emergence of adaptations scholarship, but it is by engaging with these theories via their practical application to prescribed texts in each section that we shall come to a better understanding of what adaptation studies entails and why it is an increasingly popular field of academic enquiry.