Introduction: Remixing the Classics

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on the findings of the Remixing the Classics research network, this introduction highlights the importance of both digital culture and classic literature to adaptation studies today. It starts with a historiographical account of digital media’s impact on adaptive creativity and adaptation studies, particularly in light of twenty-first-century franchise culture and transmedia storytelling. It then makes a case for the continued relevance of classic literature to these fields, despite its decreased prominence within adaptation studies and its near-invisibility in transmedia studies. That case is grounded in three arguments: the continued centrality of these texts in compulsory education, the potential for radical adaptations to articulate progressive political engagements through canonical works, and the special ability of repeatedly adapted literature to illuminate cultural change. The introduction finishes with a summary of the issue’s contents and an assertion of the artistic, pedagogical, and political significance of new media to old stories and old stories to new media.