Adapting Television and Literature

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.

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 and Blythe Worthy, "Introduction".- Part 1: Making Comedy Central.- Paul Giles, "The Aesthetics of Television: Genre, Auteur, Canon" .- Paul Sheehan, "Difficult Laughter: Modernist Aesthetics in Better Things and Atlanta" .- Part 2: Criminals, Outlaws, Auteurs.- Shannon Wells-Lassagne, "Entente Cordiale: Sherlock (BBC) and Lupin (Netflix), a Tale of Two Fandoms".- Thomas Britt, "What Is Television? Two Auteur Series in Literary Contexts".- Ryan Twomey, "Remixing the Law: Timely and Untimely Politics in Lindelof's Watchmen ".- Part 3: Adaptive Disruption: Young Adult and Children's Television.- Debra Dudek, "Ambiguous Endings and Disrupted Paratexts in The End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay With This".- Sabina Rahman, "From Medieval Legend to Modern Superheroics: Arrow as a 21^st-Century Robin Hood".- Katrine Kwong, "(Re)animating Shakespeare: Screen Theatre, on Television and Online" Pamela Demory, "Queering Emily Dickinson for the Millennial Age".- Part 4: Transnational Dramas, Transcultural Contexts Blythe Worthy, "The Suburban Serial: tracing textual and community limits in Jane Campion's Top of the Lake".- Susan Lever, "Witnessing: Indigenous Life Experience on Television" .- Meenakshi Bharat, "The Dialectic of Transnational Adaptation: The Problematic Web Adaptation of A Suitable Boy" Trisha Dunleavy, "Complex Teenage Passion: Normal People and the Affordances of Cultural Specificity".- Afterword: Christine Geraghty.