A PhD research project aiming to uncover new ways for literary adaptations to benefit and empower marginalised communities.
Research, Academic Writing
October 2020 - October 2022
While the field of adaptation studies is expanding with advancements in New Media, there is little research on the role of adaptation in the representation and empowerment of marginalised communities. With its dual connections to literature and media, academia and popular culture, the field of adaptation studies is by nature torn between past and present. Its historical emphasis on literature as the only ‘pure’ medium, its disconnection from the practical realities of adaptation and the slow process of academic research have often led adaptation studies to be several steps behind adapters and audiences. This thesis determines that diversity is a critical issue in contemporary media and one under-discussed in adaptations studies and provides suggestions to affect positive change in both scholarship and practice. This work asks how re-vision, the process of re-envisioning literary works from different perspectives, can apply to adaptation and help marginalised communities claim their place in the existing literary canon.
This thesis uses Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and Kristeva's connected theory of intertextuality as theoretical frameworks. It also relies on key theories of the bildungsroman, social justice, nineteenth-century women’s writing and re-vision, and applies them all to close readings of key adaptations of nineteenth-century women’s bildungsromane: the National Theatre’s Jane Eyre (2015), the graphic novel Jane (2017), Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), the web series The March Family Letters (2014-2015), the Netflix and CBC series Anne With an E (2018-2019) and the independent web series Project Green Gables (2015-2018). In addition, this work illustrates the importance of scholars practising adaptations by dedicating a case study chapter to the researcher’s own experiments in producing an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). This thesis demonstrates that re-visionary adaptation can be a powerful tool in benefiting and empowering marginalised communities and argues that adaptation studies must take part in contemporary conversations about representation in media. It proposes several ways to achieve this, including fostering conversation within adaptation studies and between adaptation scholars and practitioners, encouraging adaptation scholars to maintain a hand in adaptation practice, whether in industry or independently, and making space for marginalised scholars and adapters to re-envision literary works from their point of view.