Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century

Description

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. 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