Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction

Abstract

Film adaptations of literary texts can be traced back to the very early days of the commercial cinema, and countless numbers of twentieth‐century works of world fiction in English have found themselves adapted and reproduced for the visual medium of film and, later, television. The literary and film industries have both undoubtedly benefited from this relationship between media; yet the affiliation, invested as it is in both aesthetic and economic considerations, has often also been highly fraught and contentious. The relationship has been necessarily symbiotic, and as such has been marked since its inception by complications arising from the collision between different ideological, cultural, and economic spaces.