Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (review)

Reviewed by: Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan Kate Griffiths Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources. Ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. 3 vols. New York: Bloomsbury. 2022. x+ 357 pp. (vol. i); xi+ 426 pp. (vol. ii); xi+ 466 pp. (vol. iii). £495. ISBN 978–1–5013–1540–4. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan's three-volume set of critical and primary sources on adaptation is a much-needed addition to the discipline of Adaptation Studies. It traces, via a compellingly contrastive range of critical voices, the complicated relationship between source texts and their afterlives in an ever expanding range of different media. Ranging from Vachel Lindsay in 1915 to Thomas M. Leitch in 2019, Cartmell and Whelehan set themselves the daunting task of compiling the cacophonous voices commenting on and theorizing the much-disputed art of adaptation between those dates. The value of their compendium is clear. The range and diversity of their coverage maps the plethora of thinkers contributing to the discipline that is Adaptation Studies, documenting its evolution, definitions, and development. The conversations between these different thinkers take us, as readers, to the heart of the existential questions which both power and haunt Adaptation Studies: What is adaptation? What are the formative forces shaping its outputs? What is the value of those outputs? What is Adaptation Studies? How might we theorize it? Where does Adaptation Studies sit as a discipline? How do we map its borders and boundaries? Cartmell and Whelehan's collection offers no simplistic, finite answer to any of those questions. Rather, it embraces the wealth of possible responses to them, exploring the ways in which different historical moments, thinkers, creative practitioners, political contexts, and theoretical turns have answered these and other questions in intriguingly diverse ways. The compendium's focus is the history of adaptation from the early twentieth century. It deliberately takes the birth of film, the medium which would impact so powerfully on adaptation and its study, as its starting point. Subsequently, the progression is chronological. Volume i covers the period 1900–93, volume ii 1996–2007, volume iii 2007–20. The greatest space by far is allocated to the years from 1993 onwards, reflecting the acceleration and accumulation of research in this area as Adaptation Studies turned and re-turned in different theoretical directions. This collection of essays does not over-privilege the years from 1993 onwards, though. Rather, it underlines, in the telling intersections between each of its three volumes, the ways in which the present of Adaptation Studies speaks to and is shaped by its past, and itself actively shapes that past. [End Page 591] The collection offers valuable correctives to our vision of adaptation history. It has become a commonplace that Adaptation Studies began with George Bluestone's 1957 'The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film' (in his Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961)). Yet this compendium reproduces eight essential discussions of adaptation published before Bluestone's piece: works by Lindsay Vachel, Virginia Woolf, Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Lester Asheim, and François Truffaut. Cartmell and Whelehan's compendium also points out that there is, as Kamilla Elliott indicates, a history of adaptation which dates back to the Augustan period and before (Introduction to Volume i, p. 5). While an additional volume to chart this pre-history would have been very welcome, the mere acknowledgement of its existence is important. It underlines that the sources of Adaptation Studies as a discipline are in many ways as shifting as the sources of the artefacts it studies. While the approach of these edited volumes is chronological, Cartmell and Whelehan's project is no mere survey-work. Their incisive and useful overarching Introductions to each volume take us to the heart of the foundational debates of Adaptation Studies. And the contrasts and conversations generated by the juxtaposition of each volume's thinkers do likewise. The range of authors included within this compendium—film critics, theorists from many different disciplines, artists, film-makers, scriptwriters, historians, and others—is both necessary and refreshing. It speaks to the innate intersectionality...