Pockets of Change

The guiding metaphor of this volume, that of pockets as reservoirs or niches of knowledge that will expand Adaptation Studies, usefully invokes ecological and evolutionary paradigms as tools in Adaptation Studies. Starting with Julie Sanders' preface, which praises the trans-disciplinary rapport of Adaptation Studies with sociology, business studies, and performance studies, this collection consistently seeks to open up adaptation studies from 'literature on screen' to a field that examines the processes rather than the products of intertextuality and interculturality. This collection of essays marks a pocket of resistance to Adaptation Studies as we have known it. As it does not just pay lip service to the interaesthetic, intertextual, intermedial and, above all, intercultural expansion of Adaptation Studies, this volume is set to mark the next turning point in Adaptation Studies. Going far beyond established theories of adaptation, this collection is full of surprises and will be opening up new vistas in the field. Never before has a collection of essays so fully embraced the diversity of adaptation (theatre, poetry, literature, film, shows and exhibitions, consumer culture). Turning to 'adaptation' as a necessary attitude, condition, procedure and strategy in cultural and aesthetic survival, rather than merely a text based on other texts, the volume makes abundantly clear what Adaptation Studies could be in the future. All in all, this wide-ranging volume has an almost global scope -with case studies ranging from all over the Anglophone world, from New Zealand and Australia to India and Britain. It is unashamedly heterogeneous, almost eclectic - and this is precisely why it will become a standard point of reference for the growing aspirations of Adaptation Studies to become one of the key fields in the current redefinition of cultural and aesthetic analysis. -- Eckart Voigts-Virchow, University of Siegen, Germany
Expanding the accordion pleats of adaptation studies, this volume offers a series of intriguingly diverse and often cross-cultural case studies that 'rounds up the usual suspects' (film and theatre) as well as the decidedly less than 'usual' (poetic language, agricultural shows). The ethics and politics of adaptation are prominently featured in this study of adaptation and adaptability (very broadly conceived) that builds upon and also refines core theories of this rapidly changing field that studies how and why humans have always chosen to tell—and retell—stories. -- Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto
Pockets of Change will be a revelation to readers for whom adaptation study is restricted to comparing films to their source novels. Performances of Dante and verbatim theater; ekphrastic representations of visual artworks in fiction; Keats’s reading as the basis for Keats’s writing; cultural movements and attitudes as adaptive strategies; adaptation in pastoral poetry, agricultural shows, candy, and the human body—the remarkable range of texts and approaches here introduces an adventurous new spirit to adaptation study, along with a welcome invitation to further exploration. -- Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware