Adaptation and Illustration

This collection examines the relationship between illustration and adaptation from an intermedial and transcultural perspective. It aims to foster a dialogue between two fields that co-exist without necessarily acknowledging advances in each other’s domains, providing an argument for defining illustration as a form of adaptation, as well as an intermedial practice that redefines what we mean by adaptation. The volume embraces both a specific and an extended definition of illustration that accounts for its inclusion among the web of adaptive practices that developed with the rise of new media and intermediality. The contributors explore how crossovers may contribute to reappraise their objects, and rely on a transmedial and interdisciplinary corpus exploring the boundaries between illustration and other media such as texts, graphic novels, comics, theatre, film and mobile applications. Arguably adaptation, like intermediality, is an umbrella term that covers a variety of practices and products, and both of them have been shaped by intense debates over their boundaries and internal definitions. Illustration belongs to each of these areas, and this volume proposes insight into how illustration not only relates to adaptation and intermediality but how each field is redefined, enriched and also challenged by such interactions. 

Shannon Wells-Lassagne has worked extensively on film and television adaptation. She is the author of Television and Serial Adaptation, and the editor of Adapting Margaret Atwood (Palgrave), Adapting Endings, as well as of special issues of The Journal of Screenwriting, Interfaces, and TV/Series, Screen and Series. 


Sophie Aymes works on intermediality, modernist book history and illustration in 20th-century Britain. She has co-edited several word-and-image journal issues (inInterfaces and Image [&] Narrative), volumes on illustration (series Book Practices and Textual Itineraries), and a collection on Art and Science in Word and Image.