Conclusion

This chapter reflects on what a longer, trans-century purview of living writers’ variable engagements with adaptation and writing across prose, plays, screenplays, and film brings to our understanding of adaptation and intermedial studies more generally. Supplemented by other discursive forms (biographies, autobiographies, letters, periodical reviews, interviews, industry marketing, screenwriting manuals, copyright laws and more), it offers a rich, multifaceted view, bringing together discourses usually separated by media forms or century lines. Despite and because of legal and economic obstacles to adaptation, as well as limitations set by media industries and academic theories of medium specificity, literary writers engaged innovatively in writing across media. After looking back at the book and the period it addresses, the conclusion ends by looking ahead to film’s relationship with writers such as Graham Greene who, born at the turn of the century, shaped by different social and cultural contexts from their literary predecessors, created new diachronic approaches warranting closer examination in future studies of living writers responding to and writing adaptations across media.