Adaptation and Beyond (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)

This interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, that put hybridity, transtextuality, and transmediality at play. It reframes adaptation in terms of the transmedia concept of "world-building," which accurately captures the complexity and multidirectionality of contemporary scattered and ubiquitous practices of adaptation.

The editors argue that the process of moving stories or their elements across different media platforms and repurposing them for new uses results in the production of hybrid transtextualities. The book demonstrates how hybrid textualities augment narrative and literary forms as goals of their world-building, finding unexpected sites of cross-pollination, expansion, and appropriation in spoken-word and dance performance, (auto)biographical comics, advertising, Chinese Kun opera, and popular song lyrics. This yoking of hybridity and transmediality yields not only diversified and often commercialized aesthetic forms but also enables the emergence a unique cultural space in-between, a mezzaterra capable of addressing current political issues and mobilizing broader audiences

Eva C. Karpinski is Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she teaches feminist theory, life writing, and translation studies. She has published over 40 articles and book chapters. She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation and co-author of Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas and, most recently, Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism: Selected Writings of Barbara Godard (Routledge 2022). She is Associate Editor of the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak is Professor of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches English literature and cultural and adaptation studies. She has published over 50 articles and book chapters. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Controversy Over Baroque, Visual Seen and Unseen: Insights into Tom Stoppard’s Art, From Concept-City to City Experience: A Study in Urban Drama (2013). She guest co-edited (with Jacek Fabiszak) a special issue of Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (vol. 14, no. 1, 2021) and has been editor-in-chief of Anglica Wratislaviensia (Poland) since 2013.