The Adaptation Industry

Description

All around us, adaptation increasingly figures as the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies throughout its history has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries with the greatest stake in adapting cultural content, and who the decision-makers are in the adaptation process. The chief innovation of the current book is to re-imagine adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It posits the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers engaged in the actual process of adapting texts: authors and author societies; literary agents; editors and publishers; reviewers and book prize committees; screen producers; and scriptwriters. Through trading in intellectual property rights to cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation circuit are tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for success in other spheres. Focusing on contemporary adaptations, this book thus corrects previous adaptation studies’ tired over-reliance on textual analysis and reconceptualises adaptation as a complex and fascinating material system which profoundly influences the shape of contemporary culture.

Contents

Introduction: Materialising Adaptation Theory 1. What Are You Working On?: The Shifting Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-Media Adaptation 2. Literary Agents: 'Limit the Licence and Push Up the Fees, That's What It's All About' 3. Editors and Publishers: 'In Publishing, You Never Know When a Property Will Become Valuable' 4. The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 5. Keeping It 'Faithful' While Making It New: The Paradox of Adaptation for Screen Producers 6. Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Role of Screenwriters in the Contemporary Lives of Books 7. Conclusion

Author Bio

Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

Related Subjects

1. Cultural Theory
2. Cinema Studies & Popular Cinema
3. Literature & Culture