Authors and Adaptation

“Like a reporter covering nineteenth-century copyright trials, public debates between prominent authors, and major legislative developments, Annie Nissen weaves through a range of examples of writers, including Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Bernard Shaw, and the many adaptations of their books for stage and screen. This book provides a detailed picture of the business of authorship and adaptation across page, theater, and early film. Enlightening and indispensable.”

—Lissette Lopez Szwydky, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Arkansas, USA

“Nissen does an outstanding job of pushing deep into a complex matrix of issues. This is an impressive piece of scholarship and an excellent resource for adaptation studies.”

—Glenn Jellenik, Associate Professor of English, University of Central Arkansas, USA

“Spanning a wide range of authors and a long historical arc, Authors and Adaptation offers important new information about and insights into literature, theatre, film, and adaptation studies. Nissen resurrects theoretically and historically dead authors as live writers creating and critiquing intermedial adaptations, invaluably bridging gaps between theory and practice as well as between disciplines, media, and periods.”

—Kamilla Elliott, Professor of Literature and Media, Lancaster University, UK

This book studies British literary writers’ engagement with adaptations of their work across literary, theatrical, and film media in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It considers their critical, reflective, and autobiographical writings about the process of adaptation, and traces how their work was shaped, as well as delimited, by their involvement with adaptations to different media and intermedial writing. Linking canonical and non-canonical writers both chronologically and contemporaneously, and bridging studies of prose fiction adaptation from nineteenth-century theatre to early twentieth-century film, this book offers an interdisciplinary, transhistorical, cultural, and analytical study of adaptation and the variable positions of writers within and across media. 

Annie Nissen currently works at Lancaster University, UK, where she has been an Associate Lecturer for both Film Studies and English Literature and a Research Associate for the ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive’ project.