Leitch Thomas (ed.) The Scandal of Adaptation

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. — 296 p. — (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture). — ISBN 978-3-031-14152-2.The essays in this volume seek to expose the scandals of adaptation. Some of them focus on specific adaptations that have been considered scandalous because they portray characters acting in ways that give scandal, because they are thought to betray the values enshrined in the texts they adapt, because their composition or reception raises scandalous possibilities those adapted texts had repressed, or because they challenge their audiences in ways those texts had never thought to do. Others consider more general questions arising from the proposition that all adaptation is a scandalous practice that confronts audiences with provocative questions about bowdlerizing, ethics, censorship, contagion, screenwriting, and history. The collection offers a challenge to the continued marginalization of adaptations and adaptation studies and an invitation to change their position by embracing rather than downplaying their ability to scandalize the institutions they affront.Introduction
Succès de Scandale: From Adultery to Adulteration
Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945): Designing for Scandal
Sweet Smell of Success: Noiradaptation “in This Crudest of All Possible Worlds”
On Incest and Adaptation: The Foundational Scandal of Cecilia Valdés
“We Need More Input!”: John Hughes’s Weird Science (1985) and Scandals from the Red Scare to the Twitter Mob
Adaptation and Scandal in The Goldfinch
Scandalous Dystopias: Hyping The Last of Us Part II and Cyberpunk 2077 During the Pandemic
Bowdlerizing for Dollars, or Adaptation as Political Containment
(Re-)Writing the Pain:​ War, Exploitation, and the Ethics of Adapting Nonfiction
Adaptation and Censorship
Cinematic Contagion: Bereullin (The Berlin File, 2013)
Periphery and Process:​ Tracing Adaptation Through Screenplays
The Narcissistic Scandal of Adapting History