Adapting Television and Literature

Adapting Television and Literature is an incisive collection of essays that explores the growing sub-category of television adaptations of literature and poetics. Each chapter questions inflexible notions of film / literature and adaptation / intertext, focusing judiciously on emergent or overlooked media and literary forms. These lines of enquiry embrace texts both within and beyond ‘adaptation proper’, to reveal the complex relationships between literary works, television adaptations, and related dialogues of textual interconnectivity. Adapting Television and Literature proposes, in particular, a ‘re-seeing’ of four genres pivotal to television and its history: caustic comedy, which claims for itself more freedoms than other forms of scripted television; auteurist outlaw drama, an offbeat, niche genre that aligns a fixation on lawbreakers with issues of creative control; young adult reinventions that vitalise this popular, yet under-examined area of television studies; and transcultural exchanges, which highlight adaptations beyond the white, Anglo-American programming that dominates ‘peak TV’. Through these genres, Adapting Television and Literature examines the creative resources of adaptation, plotting future paths for enquiries into television, literature and transmedial storytelling.

Paul Sheehan is an Associate Professor of Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of two monographs, Modernism, Narrative, and Humanism (2002) and Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence (2013), both with Cambridge UP. His work on film / television and literary studies includes book chapters on The Matrix Trilogy, HBO’s Deadwood, and Michael Haneke; as well as journal articles on Werner Herzog and HBO’s True Detective. He is currently working on a project about Black modernism and blues culture.

Blythe Worthy is a sessional academic in the film studies and English disciplines at The University of Sydney. Blythe has had their research on television and film published by the University of California Press, Edinburgh University Press, Springer, and Rowman and Littlefield. Blythe is Managing Editor of the Australasian Journal of American Studies and has worked in research for SBS and ABC television.