Introduction: Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s Future

Abstract

This chapter situates Adaptation Before Cinema as a historical intervention into adaptation studies, making the case that an over-reliance on film adaptation has left the field historically myopic. Decentering film opens multiple directions for adaptation studies past, present, and future and brings new voices and approaches into the critical conversation. The editors of the collection trace the ways in which adaptation studies can be enriched by rethinking the function of adaptation, by not only acknowledging but also exploring adaptation as a transhistorical, global phenomenon that also crosses forms, media, and genres. Jellenik and Szwydky argue that scholars of literature and culture working in historical fields that predate the twentieth century are uniquely positioned to identify common points of interest with adaptation studies and its standard theoretical and critical approaches, demonstrating to contemporary media theorists how much twentieth- and twenty-first-century media forms and industry practices continue to be influenced not only by historical literary sources but also by early adaptation practices that predate film and other contemporary media. Attention to those older adaptations and adaptation practices can yield creative and productive critical approaches that can be applied across contemporary media adaptation studies. As Jellenik and Szwydky argue, adaptations and other forms of extension and transmediation have always driven literature, theater, art, and popular culture, as well as shaped the construction and reception histories of specific texts. These connections and broader stakes for the study of literature and culture crystallize when we excavate and analyze forms of adaptation and transmedia that drove storytelling before the twentieth century.