{"title":"Animation, Adaptation, and the Plague","authors":"Andrew Dix, Sara Read","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers the most sustained critical assessment to date of The Periwig-Maker (1999), a short-animated film that takes on the formidable challenge of adapting Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). After embedding both film and novel in intertextual webs that far exceed their putative relationship to each other, the article explores in detail two of the ways in which The Periwig-Maker transmutes its adapted text: first, its complex sound design, instantiating the plague’s soundscape that can only be faintly intimated in Defoe’s print-bound work; second, its gothic mode, hyperbolizing what is only one of a wide array of generic options followed in the Journal. The final section of the article extends the afterlives of both film and novel by considering them as fictions that, eerily, not only look backwards to the plague in the seventeenth century but forward to our own experience of deadly pandemic with COVID-19.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135694005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>Mr. Blandings</i> and the Advertisers’ Dream: The Role of Marketing in the Adaptation Process","authors":"Daria Goncharova","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay examines the role that marketing played in shaping the audience’s reception and interpretation of Eric Hodgins’ Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (originally published in 1946 as a short story titled ‘Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle’) and its 1948 film adaptation. It argues that while the print versions—modeled after Hodgins’ own unfortunate experience with the housing market before the war—relied on the self-deprecating humour to appeal to urban audiences and ultimately promote caution and frugality, the film adaptation, released at the onset of the suburban sprawl, targeted white families newly entering the middle class and promoted equality through mass consumption mythos. Working in conjunction with its massive advertising campaign that involved the construction of seventy-three replicas of the Blandings’ dream house across the United States, the film adaptation blurred the enormous disparity between Blandings’ dream and the suburban reality of baby boomers by creating new sites of middle-class identification. By reading each adaptation of the original story against the period-specific ideological forces, I demonstrate how marketing, by structuring the audience’s interpretation, shapes the process and the product of adaptation.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135689816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gentleman Jaggers: The Real Innovation in FX’s <i>Great Expectations</i> and Why Critics Didn't See It","authors":"Nancy M West","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad023","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Gentleman Jaggers: The Real Innovation in FX’s Great Expectations and Why Critics Didn't See It Get access Nancy M West Nancy M West 504 Thilly Ave., USA Email: westn@missouri.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Adaptation, apad023, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad023 Published: 28 September 2023","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135385288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body","authors":"Emer McHugh","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad024","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body Get access Christina Wilkins. Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body.London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. pp. 184, £87.50. ISBN 978-3-031-08533-8 Emer McHugh Emer McHugh Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland e.mchugh@qub.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3011-3394 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Adaptation, apad024, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad024 Published: 27 September 2023","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135477724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Historicity: Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinematic Adaptations of Non-/Anti-Realist Fiction","authors":"Yosr Dridi","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The literature on authenticity in adaptation studies seems to be focused almost entirely on adaptations of either historical and (auto-)biographical literary texts or non-fiction narratives. The usual case studies are often generically limited to heritage and historical films, period dramas, documentaries, and biopics, to the exclusion of non-/anti-realist genres. However, there is more to adaptation than empirically and/or historically verifiable source texts, which warrants an examination of authenticity in adaptations of fantastical, science-fictional, and gothic fictions away from the fixation on historicity and veracity. This paper proposes an aesthetic (metadiscursive and experiential) outlook on authenticity in genre adaptations, namely George Miller’s adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022); Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Arrival (2016); and the different adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Metadiscursively, authenticity depends on the self-consciousness of artistic representation, the extent to which the source text and its cinematic adaptation acknowledge their status as fictional narratives and their representational, medium-specific limits and potentials. Experientially, authenticity is judged by the degree of audience immersion in the storyworld, the feeling (generated by diegetic techniques) that what they are watching is experientially plausible despite the implausibility of the genre itself. Without lapsing in excessive realism and verbatim fidelity, an authentic adaptation is heedful of the paradoxes surrounding authenticity itself in any fictional narrative, attentive to their aesthetic and thematic treatment in the source text, aware of the representational affordances of the literary and cinematic media, and capable of offering the audience an immersive experience.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135959925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Paper-Engineered Pumpkin King: Exposing the Movable Impulse of <i>Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas</i>","authors":"Jodie Coates","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Nightmare Before Christmas’ director, Henry Selick, tells us that watching the film should be like opening a pop-up book. Clean-cut silhouettes, fingerprints and grooves, hidden surprises, and playful subversiveness are as integral to Nightmare’s production design as they are typical of the pop-up book form. In this article, I will examine this symmetry and discuss how Selick’s vision of a living illustration connects to the range of paper-engineered transmedia toys, books, and seasonal tokens that the film inspired. An early example is A Super Pop-Up (1993)—a charming gift book which positions the reader as a pseudo-stop-motion-animator, bending over doublespread dioramas to slide paper-cut characters into position. More recently, Reinhart’s elaborate Petrifying Pop-Up for the Holidays (2018) showcases several contemporary devices that re-create specific filmic shots. Other notable Disney-endorsed merchandise includes a Pop-Up Advent Calendar (2019), featuring an impressively tall Gothmas-esque tree, and elegant pop-up Halloween and Valentine’s cards produced by Hallmark and Lovepop. Each item treads the line between spirited plaything and fragile ornament, theatrical spectacle, and interactive artwork—a blurring of binaries that echoes the experimental artistry of Nightmare and continues to delight both young fans and adult collectors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, creative fans also appreciate Nightmare’s suitability for paper-craft, sharing printable DIY templates and paper-cut fan-art. I will demonstrate how the Victorian flavour of Nightmare, the affordances of stop-motion, and the film’s stylistic and branding choices combine to emulate and elevate the nostalgic practice of ‘making Christmas’ from the humblest of materials—paper.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135966730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Authenticity and Adaptation: Reflections on the Association of Adaptation Studies Conference 2023, University of Birmingham","authors":"Ryan Borochovitz","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Conference report for the 2023 Association of Adaptation Studies (AAS) conference, held at the University of Birmingham, on the theme of Authenticity and Adaptation.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"118 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136062337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becky Thatcher’s Literary Half-life: Appropriating Mark Twain’s Good Girl","authors":"Edward A Shannon","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mark Twain’s Becky Thatcher features very little in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She mostly vanishes after Tom Sawyer, and even in that novel she speaks fewer than a thousand words of dialogue. She disappears from Twain’s work almost completely after Huckleberry Finn, where she receives a single mention. An insignificant character to academics, Becky appears in the scholarly record little more than she had in Twain’s fiction. This essay explores Becky Thatcher’s outsized role in cinematic, literary, and other adaptations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Becky Thatcher’s literary half-life extends to clothing racks and gift shops, as well as in cinematic and literary adaptations and appropriations. These transformations map racial and sexual anxieties of several American generations. Minor though she may seem, Becky looms large in films, fiction, restaurants, tourist attractions, and all the ephemera produced from the marketing of successful fictional characters in a capitalist media landscape.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135394464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theorising the Uncanny Adaptation through <i>Hamlet</i>","authors":"Mckenzie Bergan","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Adaptations possess an uncanny quality, especially when those adaptations are built on tragic narratives. When audiences see the same characters relive the same plots in different contexts, what was once familiar becomes unfamiliar, and a kind of haunting is produced. Adaptations that move across mediums from stage to film to video games carry an especially prominent potential for uncanniness. Using adaptations of Hamlet and specifically the video game, Elsinore, to track this evolution reveals that the temporal ambiguity that the uncanny adaptation produces within a tragic narrative carries the potential to enact ethical aims, while also suggesting a way forward in thinking about that narrative’s future. By first defining the uncanny adaptation and examining Elsinore as a case study, this article explores the ethical potential that is made possible through the uncanny elements of tragic adaptation.","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"134 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135878946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Joe Kember","doi":"10.1093/adaptation/apad025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad025","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century Get access Lissette Lopez Szwydky and Glenn Jellenik, eds. Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. pp. XIV, 311, £119.99. ISBN 978-3-031-09595-5 Joe Kember Joe Kember J.E.Kember@exeter.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Adaptation, apad025, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad025 Published: 07 September 2023","PeriodicalId":42085,"journal":{"name":"Adaptation-The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134996775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}