'The twelve essays collected in Pockets of Change locate adaptation within a framework of two overlapping, if not simultaneous, creative processes: on the one hand, adaptation is to be understood as an acknowledged transposition of an existing source-that is, the process of adapting from; on the other hand, adaption is also a process of purposeful shifting and evolving of creative practices in response to external factors, including but not limited to other creative works-in other words, the process of adapting to. This book explores adaptation, then, as an active practice of repetition and as a reactive process of development or evolution. The essays also extend beyond the production, transformation, and interpretation of texts to interrogate the values and practices at work in cultural transition and transformation during periods of social and historical change. Collectively, the papers theorize adaptation by taking on three tasks: first, to examine the conditions under which the two processes of adaptation operate; second, to give an account of the space and moment in which the processes unfold (the 'pockets' of the title); and finally, to examine what emerges from pockets of adaptation. While adapting from and adapting to are both processes that appear to preclude innovation in the way that they acknowledge and depend on external sources, Pockets of Change demonstrates that adaptation is productive. It not only references prior texts, attitudes, practices and media, but it also invites us to re-visit the past and to re-think the present in new ways, potentially giving narrative space to muted or occluded voices. This book therefore brings together an innovative and varied range of approaches to, interpretations and uses of adaptation, challenging the assumption that an adaptation is simply either a 're-make' or the act of turning one medium into another. Adaptation, then, names not only the means by which texts are transformed, but also the space in which that transformation takes place. This anthology highlights the processes of adaptation and transition rather than simply focusing on the relationship between beginning and end products. In identifying these pockets of change this anthology both claims and opens up new spaces in this critical field and mode of textual analysis. ' (Back Cover)
Contents include:
1.Haunted Space: Adapting Dante's Inferno for Contemporary Performance / Sarah Thomasson
2.Adapting Verbatim Theater: David Hare's Stuff Happens / Tricia Hopton
3.Cross-Cultural Adaptation and the Transition toward Reconciliation in Australian Film and Literature: Deadly Unna? and Australian Rules / Samantha Fordham
4."Enraptured with every scent and flavour of the East"? Mira Nair's Vanity Fair as a Contrapuntal Film Adaptation / Helen Machalias
5.Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Indian English Poetry / Prithvi Varatharajan
6.Young Writer, "Young Country": Katherine Mansfield's Ambivalence toward Colonial New Zealand / Ivy McDaniels
7.Imagined Villages and Knowable Communities: Work and the Pastoral in Thomas Hardy's Poetry / Indy Clark
8.Authentic Traditions on Show? / Catherine Anne Lawrence
9.A Pocket of Change in Post-War Australia: Confectionery and the End of Childhood / Toni Risson
10."Delighted Stares": Keats's Mediated Reading / Alexandra Paterson
11."Human Cylinders": Mina Loy and the Technological Age / Jacinta Kelly
12.Between the Painting and the Novel: Ekphrasis and Witnessing in Pat Barker's Double Vision / Mary Trabucco.
'This chapter critically examines the challenges of cross-cultural narrative adaptation at a time of significant socio-political transition. The tragic story of the shooting deaths of two Indigenous youths in a remote South Australian fishing town in the 1970s became inspiration for Phillip Gwynne's debut novel Deadly Unna? (1998). The novel was a fictionalised account of his own experiences growing up in the area and was well received, winning a prestigious Children's Book Council of Australia award in 1999. It was later adapted for the screen by Paul Goldman, under the title Australian Rules (2002).' (Source: Introduction, Samantha Fordham 2011)
'...This chapter does not look specifically at textual adaptations, it uses two texts - Saturdee, a novel by Norman Lindsay published in 1934, and Anthony Kimmins's classic Australian film Smiley, released in 1956 - to examine shifts in children's status as consumers. Primarily, however, it concerns itself with the cultural transition that took place in Australia after World War Two.' (Source: Introduction, Toni Risson, 2011)
