Abstract
This afterword considers the relationship between adaptation studies and television studies. It argues that adaptation studies has neglected television’s extensive use of adaption and suggests a number of reasons for this. It offers a list of topics for consideration, including Origins, National context, Commerce, Access / Archives, Heterogeneity, Authorship, Genre, Stardom, Televisual Aesthetics, Audiences, Technological Change and Continuity.
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Notes
- 1.
As recently as 2021, Christopher Hogg could comment on the “scarcity of sustained academic examinations of the points of contact between adaptation studies and television studies,” Adapting Television Drama Theory and Industry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 4. The editors of this volume provide further material on this situation in their Introduction.
- 2.
Betty Kaklamanidou, “Introduction,” in New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, eds. Betty Kaklamanidou, Thomas Leitch, Eurydice Da Silva, Christina Wilkins, Simon Brown, Stacey Abbott, Thomas Britt, Nicole Pizarro and Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,2020), 4. See also Thomas M. Leitch (Film Adaptation and Its Discontents From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007], 1) and Robert Geal (Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation: A Case Study of Shakespearean Films [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019], 11).
- 3.
See, for instance, Annette Kuhn’s discussion of the theoretical differences between the film spectator positioned by the cinematic text as conceived in film studies and television studies’ social audiences in “Women’s Genres,” Screen 25, no.1 (1984): 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/25.1.18
- 4.
See, for example, Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide (London: Pluto Press, 1996).
- 5.
See Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2005) and MĂreĂa Aragay, ed. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Amsterdam, NL: Rodophi, 2005). An exception was the slightly later collection, Rachel Carroll, ed., Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (London: Continuum, 2009) which carried a number of articles on adaptations for television.
- 6.
Roberta Pearson and Anthony N Smith, “Introduction,” in Pearson and Smith, eds., Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age Exploring Screen Narratives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.
- 7.
See the blog I wrote about the first episode for more detail about my response: (https://cstonline.net/a-suitable-boy-the-demands-of-cross-cultural-viewing-by-christine-geraghty-with-roy-stafford/)
- 8.
Hogg, Adapting Television Drama, 3.
- 9.
Women and Soap Opera: a Study of Prime Time Soaps (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991).
- 10.
See Robert C. Allen, ed., To Be Continued...: Soap Operas Around the World (London: Routledge, 1997) for examples of such work.
- 11.
Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Television and Serial Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2017), 3.
- 12.
For more on this, see Jean Chalaby, The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2015). As I write, a very welcome analysis of a fictional example of formatting has just been published by adaptation scholars, Eckart Voigts and Heebon Park-Finch, “TV Cloning as Transcultural Adaptation: The Reformatting of the Medea Myth via Doctor Foster,” Adaptation, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apad011
- 13.
Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002). Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
- 14.
Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
- 15.
See Matt Sexton and Malcolm Cook’s Adapting Science Fiction to Television: Small Screen, Expanded Universe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) and Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott’s TV Horror: Investigating the Darker Side of the Small Screen (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013) for examples of this work.
- 16.
See in particular Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited.
- 17.
James Walters, “Finding words: Aesthetic criticism and television,” Critical Studies in Television, 2023, Online First, https://doi.org/10.1177/17496020231154462
- 18.
Ien Ang Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen and Co., 1985). For research into family viewing, see David Morley, Family Television, Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Comedia, 1986) and for technology of viewing see Ann Gray, Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology (London: Routledge,1992).
- 19.
Hogg, Adapting Television Drama, 237.
- 20.
M E Brown, Brown, Soap Opera and Women’s Talk (London: Sage,1994); Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt, Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate (London: Routledge,1994).
- 21.
Pearson and Smith, “Introduction,” 5.
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Geraghty, C. (2024). An Afterword: Adapting the Television of Television Studies. In: Worthy, B., Sheehan, P. (eds) Adapting Television and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50832-5_14
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