Adaptation Industry

Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Melbourne.

• Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1: What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation 2: World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary Mediasphere 3: Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks as Engine-rooms of Adaptation 4: The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-winners on Screen 5: Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry 6: Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies for Converting Readers into Audiences Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures Notes Bibliography Index

"Simone Murray’s book makes good on its promise to materialize adaptation studies. Murray frees the study of adaptation from its most persistent and constraining orthodoxies: the reliance on text-based analysis, the preoccupation with issues of fidelity, the privileging of individual over institutional agency. The Adaptation Industry gives us the first systematic examination of the way adaptations are produced: not as versions or translations of an original, nor as mere mediations between properly artistic fields of practice, but as a cultural form in their own right – and one whose ascendency in our time has not, until now, been at all adequately appreciated. This is a game-changing book which no one interested in cultural theory or the contemporary narrative arts can afford to ignore."-- James F. English, University of Pennsylvania