Adaptation Before Cinema

Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, USA, and author of Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (2020). She specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture, adaptation and transmedia storytelling, and gender studies.Glenn Jellenik is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas, USA. His research focuses on long-eighteenth-century adaptation. His essay, “The Origins of Adaptation, as Such: The Birth of a Simple Abstraction” (Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017)), traces the rise of contemporary notions of adaptation to the Romantic period.

• Introduction “Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s Future”, Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky.- Part 1: Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically.- Chapter 1 “Of Human Bondage: Recombinant Replications of Supplication and Social Justice since Antiquity”, Mary-Antoinette Smith.- Chapter 2 “Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism and the Rise of Novelization”, Glenn Jellenik.- Chapter 3 “Poetry after Descartes: Henry More’s Adaptive Poetics”, Melissa Caldwell.- Chapter 4 “History and/as Adaptation: MacBeth and the Rhizomatic Adaptation of History”, Anja Hartl.- Chapter 5 “Fakespeare; or, Authorship by Any Other Name”, Jim Casey.- Part 2: Transmedia Culture-Texts.- Chapter 6 “Shakespeare’s Adaptations of Fairy Stories”, Valerie Guyant.- Chapter 7 “The Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-Century Theater and Visual Culture”, Katie Noble.- Chapter 8 “The Making of Monsters: Thomas Potter Cooke and the Theatrical Debuts of Frankenstein and The Vampyre in the 1820s”, Eleanor Bryan.- Chapter 9 “Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Intersection of Painting and Poetry”, Dominique Gracia.- Chapter 10 “Markers of Class: The Antebellum Children’s Book Adaptations of The Lamplighter and Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Maggie E. Morris Davis.- Chapter 11 “Alice, Animals, and Adaptation: John Tenniel’s Influence on Wonderland and Its Early Adaptation History”, Kristen L. Figgins.- CODA “Transmedia Cultural History in/and the Future of Adaptation Studies”, Lissette Lopez Szwydky.

“Adaptation Before Cinema is most certainly a welcome introduction to this possibility for the un-siloing of humanities into intellectual common spaces, and it helpfully points towards some opportunities presented by this possibility. … the book fulfils admirably the generic promise of the best essay collections, offering a glimpse at a wide range of perspectives, whose heterogeneity remains the primaryattraction.” (Joe Kember, Adaptation, September 7, 2023)