This book explores the impact of the body on the mediation of character in adaptations. Specifically, it thinks about how identity is shaped by the body and how this alters meanings of adaptations. With an increasingly digital world, the importance of the body may be seen as diminishing. However, the book highlights the different political and social meanings the body signifies, which in turn renders character. Through a discussion of adaptations of sexuality, race, and mental difference, the mediation of character is shown to be tied to the physical. The book challenges the hierarchies in place both for the understanding of character, which privileges the actor, and in adaptations, which privileges the original. The discussion of the body, character, and adaptation asserts that the meanings the physical has in its shaping of, and by, character in adaptations reflect the way in which we position our own bodies in the world.
Author(s): Christina Wilkins
Series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 183
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Works Cited
Chapter 2: The Acting Body
Typecasting and Adaptation
Body as Medium
Body as Adaptation
Bodily Fidelity
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Bodily Knowledge
Reception and Adaptation
Stardom, Performance, and the Body
Constructing/Receiving a Character
Performance and the Character
Adapting Character as Audience Practice
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Character Infusion
Actor Versus Character
Creating Character
Character as Spectrum
Character/Charactor and Adaptations
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Embodying Identities
The Body, Ideology, and Performance
Queer Adaptation and the Biopic
Race and Adaptation
Death Note, Ghost in the Shell, and Advantageous
Representation and Spectating Racebending
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Shaping the Psyche
Illness, Identity, and Narrative
Constructing Psychological Difference
The Body as Symptomatic
Repetitions
Works Cited
Index
