[ecrea] New book: The Adaptation Industry

Listserve members may be interested in a newly published research 
monograph, */The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of 
Contemporary Literary Adaptation/*, which analyses adaptation as a 
sociological, material and institutional process.

Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with 
stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation 
studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis, in 
particular with compare-and-contrast studies of individual novel and 
film pairings. This has left almost completely unexamined crucial 
questions of how adaptations come to be made, what are the industries 
with the greatest stake in making them, and who the decision-makers are 
in the adaptation process. /The Adaptation Industry/ re-imagines 
adaptation not as an abstract process, but as a material industry. It 
presents the adaptation industry as a cultural economy of six 
interlocking institutions, stakeholders and decision-makers all engaged 
in the actual business of adapting texts: authors; agents; publishers; 
book prize committees; scriptwriters; and screen producers and 
distributors. Through trading in intellectual property rights to 
cultural works, these six nodal points in the adaptation network are 
tightly interlinked, with success for one party potentially auguring for 
success in other spheres. But marked rivalries between these 
institutional forces also exist, with competition characterizing every 
aspect of the adaptation process. This book constructs an overdue 
sociology of contemporary literary adaptation, never losing sight of the 
material and institutional dimensions of this powerful process.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies 
<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/SE0304/>

New York: Routledge, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-415-99903-8

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415999038/

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Dr Simone Murray

Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies

& Director, The Centre for the Book

School of English, Communications & Performance Studies

Monash University

Menzies building (#11), Room W709

Clayton VIC 3800, AUSTRALIA

Email: (Simone.Murray /at/ monash.edu)

Tel. +61 (0)3 9905 2220

Fax. +61 (0)3 9905 2135

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/people/simone-murray/

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