Abstract
Adaptation studies, whether situated in literary or media studies, lacks a coherent model that illustrates how many adaptations of the same story work together, creating what Paul Davis, Brian Rose, and others refer to as “culture-texts.” Culture-texts are retold and remade countlessly, over long periods of time, building a large network of adaptations and remakes that is neither owned nor dominated by a particular author, medium, or “authoritative” version. Similarly, contemporary media studies does not fully account for how much today’s industry practices are inheritances of the past—adapted and repackaged not only for modern audiences but also for new technological, economic, legal, political, and social contexts. This chapter adapts and expands Henry Jenkins’s theories of transmedia storytelling, convergence culture, and participatory culture to develop a new model for transhistorical adaptation studies. This transhistorical view includes storytelling across a diverse range of forms and media, including literature, the performing arts, visual arts, film and television, new media, and immersive/hybrid forms. Szwydky’s “Transmedia cultural history” expands existing definitions to include long-term historical awareness and engagement. Transmedia cultural history incorporates practices of artistic production, industrial convergence, and ongoing audience (and scholarly) reception. This term explores how technology, spectacle, celebrity, the proliferation and commercialization of art forms, world-building, tie-ins, and merchandizing functioned at different historical moments. Moreover, it provides opportunities to identify and examine how cultural production in early periods has influenced complementary practices in later periods, including the present.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, Routledge, 1991.
Dudley Andrew, “Adaptation,” in Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 96–106.
Bortolotti, Gary, and Linda Hutcheon, “On the Origins of Adaptation: Rethinking ‘Success’—Biologically.” New Literary History (2007): 443–58.
Brylowe, Thora. Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Fernandez, Jay A. “Oscars 2014: How Adaptations Continue to Shape the Conversation.” Signature-Reads, 24 February 2014, http://www.signature-reads.com/2014/02/oscars-2014-how-adaptations-continue-to-shape-the-conversation/
Forry, Steven. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Friedlander, Whitney. “125+ Books Becoming TV Series We Cannot Wait to See.” Rotten Tomatoes. September 3, 2021. https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/books-becoming-tv-and-streaming-series/
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Originally published in French by Editions du Seuil, 1982.
Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.
Jellenik, Glenn. “The Task of the Adaptation Critic” in, eds. Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds, edited by Julie Grossman and J. Barton Palmer, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 37–52.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.” Henryjenkins.org. 31 July 2011. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html
Laird, Karen E. The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848–1920: Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White. Ashgate, 2015.
Lanier, Douglas M. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 21–40.
Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (Spring 2003), 149–71.
MacCabe, Colin, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner, eds. True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Manshel, Alexander, Laura B. McGrath, and J. D. Porter. Illustrations by Vanessa Saba. “The Rise of Must-Read TV: How Your Netflix Habit is Changing Content.” The Atlantic, 16 July 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/tv-adaptations-fiction/619442/
Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. University of Georgia Press, 2005.
Meikle, Kyle. Adaptations in the Franchise Era, 2001–2016. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton University Press, 1983.
Mittell, Jason. “Operational Seriality and the Operation of Seriality.” The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, eds. Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol. Edinburg University Press, 2018, 227–38.
Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. Routledge, 2012.
Nealon, Jeffrey T., and Caren Irr, eds. Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique. State University of New York Press, 2002.
Rigney, Anne. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge, 2007.
Semenza, Gregory. “Towards a Historical Turn? Adaptation Studies and the Challenges of History.” The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts, Routledge, 2018, 58–66.
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Adaptations, Culture-Texts, and Literary Canonization.” The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts, Routledge, 2018, 128–42.
—. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio State University Press, 2020.
Thomas, Kaitlin. “Everything’s an Adaptation: You Won’t Believe How Many Current TV Shows Began as Something Else,” Tv.com, 28 August 2014, http://www.tv.com/news/tv-show-adaptations-140909871911/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Szwydky, L.L. (2023). CODA: Transmedia Cultural History, Convergence Culture, and the Future of Adaptation Studies. In: Szwydky, L.L., Jellenik, G. (eds) Adaptation Before Cinema. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-09595-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-09596-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)