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 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.