Introduction: Genesis of the Tele-Text

In our current infatuation with networked culture, the principle of connection is more prized than ever. We are reminded of its importance in our roles as researchers, particularly via the transdisciplinary practices that are now commonplace across the humanities. But within the current media ecology, these affordances have also precipitated certain complications. For a field of enquiry to be taken seriously, for it to be grasped on its own terms, a degree of definitional precision is mandatory—a sense that it is both singular and heterogeneous, and not beholden to more established disciplines. So it is with adaptation studies and television studies, as contemporary scholars separate their subject-areas from such traditional, ‘legitimate’ fields of knowledge as literary studies, film studies and media studies. It is also the case that these ‘mother’ disciplines have, at various points, threatened to subsume both television studies and adaptation studies. Though they might use literary-television adaptations as objects of analysis, and even apply novel methodologies to study them, these broader areas of enquiry tend not to see adaptation as a productive field, output or process, in and of itself.