Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century

312 Pages·2023·7.975 MB·English

by  Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Glenn Jellenik

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE
Adaptation
Before Cinema
Literary and Visual
Convergence from
Antiquity through the
Nineteenth Century
Edited by
Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Glenn Jellenik
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer
Atlanta, GA, USA
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus
on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision
to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive
understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger
phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not sin-
gular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural
forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations,
remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes
studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and
these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on
aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as con-
nected to various forms of visual culture.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky • Glenn Jellenik
Editors
Adaptation Before
Cinema
Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity
through the Nineteenth Century
Editors
Lissette Lopez Szwydky Glenn Jellenik
Department of English Department of English
University of Arkansas University of Central Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR, USA Conway, AR, USA
ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-09595-5 ISBN 978-3-031-09596-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Image courtesy of the National Library of France. Scene from Le Monstre
et le Magician (1826), a play based on Frankenstein.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
C
ontents
1 Introduction: Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s Future 1
Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Part I Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically 19
2 A Classical Drama of Human Bondage: Recurrent
Replications of Supplication, Appeals, and Social Justice
Activism from Antiquity Through the Present 21
Mary-Antoinette Smith
3 Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism
and the Rise of Novelization 49
Glenn Jellenik
4 Poetry After Descartes: Henry More’s Adaptive Poetics 69
Melissa Caldwell
5 History and/as Adaptation: MacBeth and the Rhizomatic
Adaptation of History 91
Anja Hartl
6 Shakespeare, Fakespeare: Authorship by Any Other Name 113
Jim Casey
v
vi CONTENTS
Part II Transmedia Culture-Texts 135
7 Shakespeare’s Adaptations of the Fae and a “Shrewd and
Knavish Sprite” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 137
Valerie Guyant
8 The Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-
Century Theatre and Visual Culture 155
Katie Noble
9 The Making of Monsters: Thomas Potter Cooke and the
Theatrical Debuts of Frankenstein and The Vampyre 183
Eleanor Bryan
10 Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Intersection of Painting
and Poetry 213
Dominique Gracia
11 Markers of Class: The Antebellum Children’s Book
Adaptations of The Lamplighter and Uncle Tom’s Cabin 235
Maggie E. Morris Davis
12 Alice, Animals, and Adaptation: John Tenniel’s Influence
on Wonderland and Its Early Adaptation History 261
Kristen Layne Figgins
13 CODA: Transmedia Cultural History, Convergence
Culture, and the Future of Adaptation Studies 283
Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Index 305
n C
otes on ontributors
Eleanor Bryan is an associate lecturer at the University of Lincoln,
UK. She holds a PhD (2022), and her research primarily concerns dra-
matic adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula. Wider research interests
include Romanticism, fin-de-siècle literature, representations of monstros-
ity, and cinematic and theatrical adaptation.
Melissa Caldwell is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University.
Her research interests include textual adaptations across different time
periods and cultures, seventeenth-century intellectual history, and war lit-
erature. Her recent work has focused on contemporary adaptations of pre-
modern texts, early modern skepticism, trauma and literature, and
Shakespeare and twenty-first-century politics.
Jim Casey is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities
Grant recipient, editor of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen,
and co-editor of Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. He has over thirty peer-
reviewed publications, including essays on fantasy, monstrosity, pedagogy,
theory, old age, comics, masculinity, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ovid, Firefly,
and Battlestar Galactica.
Kristen Layne Figgins holds a PhD in English from the University of
Arkansas. Their specialization is nineteenth-century British literature, crit-
ical animal studies, and adaptation. Their research involves tracing how
developments in natural science and animal rights philosophy are adapted
in transhistorical literature. They are the co-editor of Boom or Bust:
Narrative, Life, and Culture from the West Texas Oil Patch (2021).
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dominique Gracia is a Victorianist and writer specializing in the things
that repeat, from popular-fiction tropes to myths and legends. Her recent
publications examine Sherlock Holmes’ influence on twenty-first-century
TV and Victorian women’s ekphrastic writing. She is at University College
London’s Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose.
Valerie Guyant is an associate professor at Montana State University–
Northern in Havre, Montana, where she teaches writing, literary theory,
world literatures, and popular genre courses. She holds a PhD in Literature
from Northern Illinois University (2011). Her primary areas of research
are folklore, popular culture, and speculative fiction.
Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Konstanz,
Germany, where she is working on a postdoctoral project on shame in the
Victorian novel. Her research interests include contemporary British the-
ater, Victorian fiction, affect theory, William Shakespeare, and adaptation
studies. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama:
Dialectical Theatre Today (2021).
Glenn Jellenik is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Central Arkansas. His research focuses on long-eighteenth-century adap-
tation. His essay, “The Origins of Adaptation, as Such: the Birth of a
Simple Abstraction” (Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017)),
traces the rise of contemporary notions of adaptation to the
Romantic period.
Maggie E. Morris Davis researches representations of children in pov-
erty in American literature and culture and children’s literature. Her work
has been published in Canadian Review of American Studies, Middle West
Review, and Stephen Crane Studies. She works in the Department of
English at Illinois State University.
Katie Noble is a DPhil student in English at Christ Church, University
of Oxford. Their research broadly considers the F. B. Brady Collection of
theatrical ephemera and focuses on the mediation of women’s theatrical
performance in both the eighteenth century and the contemporary
archive.
Mary-Antoinette Smith is Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century British Literature at Seattle University. Her pedagogy and schol-
arship as a women and gender studies specialist promotes praxis-centered
race, class, and gender/sexuality theory, and her publications include
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano: Essays on the Slavery and Commerce
of the Human Species (2010).
Lissette  Lopez  Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Arkansas and author of Transmedia Adaptation in the
Nineteenth Century (2020). She specializes in nineteenth-century litera-
ture and culture, adaptation and transmedia storytelling, gothic monsters,
and gender studies.