Introduction

This first chapter outlines the historical and interdisciplinary scope, specific content, arguments, and aims of Authors and Adaptation: Writing Across Media in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, a transhistorical, transmedial study addressing living writers’ engagements with adaptations of their own writing across different media. In the process, it addresses intermedial relationships between prose fiction, theatre, and film, adaptation practices, and writing across media in this period more generally, in dialogue with contemporaneous theoretical discourses as well as more recent studies. Arguing for the value of wider historical and interdisciplinary study, it sets authors, texts, media, and adaptation practices in dialogue within and across centuries and media forms and conventions. Setting the groundwork for subsequent chapters, the introduction also provides a rationale for the choice of authors, methodology, historical range, media forms, industries, and disciplines.