Adapting Fiction Into Visual Culture
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Film, Television, and Media Studies in the Humanities".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (14 April 2023) | Viewed by 2684
Special Issue Editor
Interests: victorian and early twentieth century literature on screen; early twentieth-century women’s literature; victorian women’s literature; middlebrow studies
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In 1964 film critic Alain Renais famously remarked that “simply adapting a novel without changing it is like reheating a meal.” Thus began a critical shift in Adaptation (or Translation) Studies from a shared scholarly advocation of fidelity as the benchmark for a successful adaptation into wider conversations less about what screen adaptations should be and more about what they are and the nature of the intermedialities between source texts and their versions in visual culture. The discipline has become a pluralistic enterprise, recognising the numerous kinds of intertextual and culturally loaded possibilities and interpretations which can be brought to and identified within both the fictional source and its visual translation(s), while examining the effects that have been achieved in the process of transition from print to screen. As Adaptation Studies has matured and developed, these have become cultural rather than aesthetic concerns, relating primarily to the extent to which particular adaptations are vehicles of hegemonic and/ or progressive cultural values.
For this new Special Issue, entitled "Adapting fiction into visual culture”, submissions are invited on adaptations of written texts, high or low, canonical or popular,( including novels, short stories, plays, comic books,) into visual cultural productions such as film, TV, and online videos. It is anticipated that the articles submitted will mainly take the form of case studies of texts which have so far evaded scholarship or which it is timely to examine from fresh perspectives. It is envisaged that these will focus on cultural and contextual analysis, examining how the content - the meaning, themes, ideas, values, beliefs, ideologies of the source and adaptation - are related to the circumstances of their production, social, historical, economic, political and textual. Articles which apply current theoretical perspectives, particularly Ecocriticism, Post colonialism, Race Studies, disability Theory, Queer theory and Gender theory are particularly welcome.
Topics might include (but this is not an exclusive list):
- the nature and purpose of Adaptation Studies as a theory and discipline;
- the purposes of adaptation and what particular adaptations do (and should do) with their source text;
- adaptations which shed light on the dialogue between the original text and its context;
- adaptations which augment the conservatism of the original novel;
- adaptations which subvert the original text and expose its conservative cultural and ideological functions;
- adaptations which reveal or question contemporary hegemonies and truth values;
- how the adaptation is influenced / compromised by issues of production, funding and distribution;
- adaptations which can arguably be regarded as aesthetically, philosophically, ethically ‘superior’ to the original text;
- how elements of the filmic mode such as sound, mise-en-scene, iconography, cinematography, editing work in an adaptation to create meaning and effect and perpetuate particular cultural values;
- whether some literary texts are untranslatable or unadaptable.
The abstract submission deadline of this special issue is 31st December 2022.
Dr. Louise McDonald
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
