Adaptation Before Cinema highlights a range of pre-cinematic media forms, including theater, novelization, painting and illustration, transmedia art, children’s media, and other literary and visual culture. The book expands the primary scholarly audience of adaptation studies from film and media scholars to literary scholars and cultural critics working across a range of historical periods, genres, forms, and media. In doing so, it underscores the creative diversity of cultural adaptation practiced before cinema came to dominate the critical conversation on adaptation. Collectively, the chapters construct critical bridges between literary history and contemporary media studies, foregrounding diverse practices of adaptation and providing a platform for innovative critical approaches to adaptation, appropriation, or transmedia storytelling popular from the Middle Ages through the invention of cinema. At the same time, they illustrate how these forms of adaptation not only influenced the cinematic adaptation industry of the twentieth century but also continue to inform adaptation practices in the twenty-first century transmedia landscape. Written by scholars with expertise in historical, literary, and cultural scholarship ranging from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, the chapters use discourses developed in contemporary adaptation studies to shed new lights on their respective historical fields, authors, and art forms.
Author(s): Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Glenn Jellenik
Series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 311
City: Cham
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s Future
Overview of Chapters
Works Cited
Part I: Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically
Chapter 2: A Classical Drama of Human Bondage: Recurrent Replications of Supplication, Appeals, and Social Justice Activism from Antiquity Through the Present
The Transhistorical, Visualized Drama of Human Bondage in Five Acts
Epilogue of the Drama of Human Bondage Across History
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism and the Rise of Novelization
Part I: Godwin’s Chosen Vehicle or Novelizations as They Are
Novelization as “More than Mere Translation”
Novelizing the Wrongs of Women
Conclusion: Reconsidering the Logic of the Parasite
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Poetry After Descartes: Henry More’s Adaptive Poetics
Adapting Poetics for a Cartesian World
Revision as Adaptation
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 5: History and/as Adaptation: MacBeth and the Rhizomatic Adaptation of History
History and/as Adaptation: Twenty-First-Century and Renaissance Perspectives
Macbeth and the Rhizomatic Process of Mythologisation
Interrogating History and/as Adaptation in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Its Adaptations
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Shakespeare, Fakespeare: Authorship by Any Other Name
Rhizomes and Descendant Adaptations
Fakespeares, Originality, and the Mapping of “Shakespeare”
The Tempest and the Name-of-Shakespeare
Works Cited
Part II: Transmedia Culture-Texts
Chapter 7: Shakespeare’s Adaptations of the Fae and a “Shrewd and Knavish Sprite” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Works Cited
Chapter 8: The Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-Century Theatre and Visual Culture
Medea and Motherhood in the Eighteenth Century: A Medea Network
Romney’s Breastfeeding Murderess
The Sitter/Actress as Medea
Works Cited
Chapter 9: The Making of Monsters: Thomas Potter Cooke and the Theatrical Debuts of Frankenstein and The Vampyre
Textual Origins and Ties: ‘We Will Each Write a Ghost Story’
Early Adaptations of The Vampire (1819): ‘His Lordship Seemed Quite Changed’
Early Adaptations of Frankenstein: ‘The Monster Approaches Him with Gestures of Conciliation’
From Celebrity to Icon: Cooke’s Performance and Its Impact on Visual Culture from the 1820s Through to the Present
Conclusion: Exit, Pursued by Another Monster
Works Cited
Chapter 10: Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Intersection of Painting and Poetry
Ekphrasis and the Observer Effect
Rossetti: A Transmedia Artist in the Marketplace
‘Pot-Boiling’ or ‘Renascence’?
Working in Gaps
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Markers of Class: The Antebellum Children’s Book Adaptations of The Lamplighter and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
“Moved to Tears and Docility”: Illustrations of Marginalized Children in Jewett’s Antebellum Abolitionist Adaptation Network
“These Were Not Children”: Reading Children Within Antebellum Adaptation Networks
“Written for the Little [White] Folks”: How Adaptation Makes Visible Unmarked Difference
Works Cited
Chapter 12: Alice, Animals, and Adaptation: John Tenniel’s Influence on Wonderland and Its Early Adaptation History
“And What Is the Use, Thought Alice, of a Book Without Pictures”: Carroll, Tenniel, and Illustration as Adaptation
“A Drama (or Extravaganza) for Children”: Carroll and Alice’s Early Stage History
“To Talk of Many Things”: Multivocality and Authority in Pre-cinematic Adaptation
Works Cited
Chapter 13: CODA: Transmedia Cultural History, Convergence Culture, and the Future of Adaptation Studies
Transmedia Cultural History: A Model
Transmedia Cultural History: The Possibilities (Micro, Macro, Meta)
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
