Adapting Television and Literature (2024)

Adapting Television and Literature is an incisive collection of essays that explores the growing sub-category of television adaptations of literature and poetics. Each chapter questions inflexible notions of film / literature and adaptation / intertext, focusing judiciously on emergent or overlooked media and literary forms. These lines of enquiry embrace texts both within and beyond 'adaptation proper', to reveal the complex relationships between literary works, television adaptations, and related dialogues of textual interconnectivity. Adapting Television and Literature proposes, in particular, a 're-seeing' of four genres pivotal to television and its history: caustic comedy, which claims for itself more freedoms than other forms of scripted television; auteurist outlaw drama, an offbeat, niche genre that aligns a fixation on lawbreakers with issues of creative control; young adult reinventions that vitalise this popular, yet under-examined area of television studies; and transcultural exchanges, which highlight adaptations beyond the white, Anglo-American programming that dominates 'peak TV'. Through these genres, Adapting Television and Literature examines the creative resources of adaptation, plotting future paths for enquiries into television, literature and transmedial storytelling.