HUTCHEON, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, New York / London, Routledge, 2006, 272 p.
ISBN : 0415967945
Are we living in the age of adaptation? In contemporary cinema, of course, there are enough adaptations --based on everything from comic books to the novels of Jane Austen--to make us wonder if Hollywood has run out of new stories. But if you think adaptation can be understood by using novels and films alone, you're wrong. Today there are also song covers rising up the pop charts, video game versions of fairy tales, and even roller coasters based on successful movie franchises.
Despite their popularity, however, adaptations are usually treated as secondary and derivative. Whether in the form of a Broadway musical or a hit television show, adaptations are almost inevitably regarded as inferior to the "original." But are they?
Here, renowned literary scholar Linda Hutcheon explores the ubiquity of adaptations in all their various media incarnations--and challenges their constant critical denigration. Adaptation, Hutcheon argues, has always been a central mode of the story--telling imagination and deserves to be studied in all its breadth and range as both a process (of creation and reception) and a product unto its own.
Persuasive and illuminating, A Theory of Adaptation is a bold rethinking of how adaptation works across all media and genres that may put an end to the age--old question of whether the book was better than the movie, or the opera, or the theme park.
Linda Hutcheon is Distinguished University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her many books include A Poetics of Postmodernism, The Politics of Postmodernism, Irony's Edge, and, most recently, Opera: Desire Disease, Death, which she co-wrote with her husband, Michael Hutcheon.