The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation

All around us, adaptation increasingly figures as the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies throughout its history has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries with the greatest stake in adapting cultural content, and who the decision-makers are in the adaptation process. The chief innovation of the current book is to re-imagine adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It posits the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers engaged in the actual process of adapting texts: authors and author societies; literary agents; editors and publishers; reviewers and book prize committees; screen producers; and scriptwriters. Through trading in intellectual property rights to cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation circuit are tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for success in other spheres. Focusing on contemporary adaptations, this book thus corrects previous adaptation studies#xE2;#xAC;" tired over-reliance on textual analysis and reconceptualises adaptation as a complex and fascinating material system which profoundly influences the shape of contemporary culture.