Adaptation ed. by Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw (review)

Tapping into and furthering current movements in the sphere of adaptation studies, this edited volume seeks both to valorize adaptations as artefacts and to broaden our definition of them. Adaptation argues that, far from being derivative, second-hand, safe, commercial texts, the best adaptations are original, creative, spontaneous art works with much to tell us about authorship and originality. Further, the volume makes the case cumulatively that adaptation must be studied in transtextual, transmedial, and transhistorical contexts in order that its intricacies be thrown into relief. The strengths of the collection are clear, and the editors are to be commended for the breadth of its exploration of adaptation. Instead of concentrating on the much-studied relationship between novel and film, Adaptation considers the adaptive process in relation to images, comics, literary works, language, theatre, translation, science, and mimesis. The focus on marketing, transnational reception, and star studies is also refreshing, for it underlines that adaptations, as well as being objects of academic study, are also often commercially driven artefacts whose public audience is all too frequently ignored. Moving from the Middle Ages to the present day, the volume assesses adaptation as a cultural phenomenon across time, media, and, in places, nation. Its engagement with the voices of practitioners, in the form of an interview with Di Trevis relating to her work on À la recherche du temps perdu, is useful. So too is the insistence that adaptation, rather than being a process external to ‘original’ works, is often an essential part of that very creativity. Such evident breadth and the cumulative scope of the chapters could potentially affect the volume’s overall coherence, but Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw work hard, and successfully, in their Introduction to build bridges between the five thematic topics of the book: Translation and Adaptation of Scripts and Images from the Medieval and Early Modern Periods; From Source to Stage: Adaptation in French Theatre; Adaptation and Translation in Postcolonial Writing; Trans-cultural and Trans-historical Reception in Literature and Film; and Performance, Adaptation and Subjectivity. The editors are clear in their sense of purpose and confident in their interpretation of the space that the volume occupies in the current critical landscape of adaptation studies. For those with a scholarly interest in the creation and re-creation of texts across time and media, Adaptation offers much enjoyable reading matter. The chapters are of a consistent quality and, in their range and diversity, raise intriguing questions about the borders and boundaries of the discipline. Archer and Weisl-Shaw provide a dynamic vision of adaptation as a process innate to artistry itself, a process whose outputs are at once creatively compelling and academically intriguing.