Adapting the Canon

Adapting the Canon brings together some of the most recent and exciting research in the growing field of adaptation studies, charting the passage of canonical texts across time, cultures and different media. Spanning several Humanities disciplines, the essays in this volume explore key questions about what adaptation means for the canonical work, focusing on texts adapted into and from English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, from the medieval world to the twenty-first century.

Adaptation is much more than the process by which great novels become films. In this rich selection of case studies, canonical figures such as Austen, Dickens, Goethe, Hugo, Kafka, Pound, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Villon, Voltaire, and Zola are reimagined in a range of media which has never been so broad as today, from theatre, radio and television to the smartphone.

Ann Lewis is Senior Lecturer in French in the Department of Cultures and Languages at Birkbeck, University of London, and works on eighteenth-century French literature and text/image relations. Silke Arnold-de Simine is also at Birkbeck, as Reader in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on (trans-)media aesthetics and ethics, especially memory cultures.