Simone Murray's book makes good on its promise to materialize adaptation studies. Murray frees the study of adaptation from its most persistent and constraining orthodoxies: the reliance on text-based analysis, the preoccupation with issues of fidelity, the privileging of individual over institutional agency. The Adaptation Industry gives us the first systematic examination of the way adaptations are produced: not as versions or translations of an original, nor as mere mediations between properly artistic fields of practice, but as a cultural form in their own right - and one whose ascendency in our time has not, until now, been at all adequately appreciated. This is a game-changing book which no one interested in cultural theory or the contemporary narrative arts can afford to ignore.-- James F. English, University of Pennsylvania
Simone Murray's book makes good on its promise to materialize adaptation studies. Murray frees the study of adaptation from its most persistent and constraining orthodoxies: the reliance on text-based analysis, the preoccupation with issues of fidelity, the privileging of individual over institutional agency. The Adaptation Industry gives us the first systematic examination of the way adaptations are produced: not as versions or translations of an original, nor as mere mediations between properly artistic fields of practice, but as a cultural form in their own right - and one whose ascendency in our time has not, until now, been at all adequately appreciated. This is a game-changing book which no one interested in cultural theory or the contemporary narrative arts can afford to ignore. - James F. English, University of Pennsylvania, USA
This book is the culmination of Murray's investigations and a powerful argument for reconfiguration of scholarly practice in studying the convergent media industry within which adaptation is practiced. It is informed by her close industrial observation and traces the roles of the six stakeholder groups she identifies: authors, agents, publishers, festival directors, literary prize-giving committees and film producers and distributors. - Frances Bonner, Script and Print
Murray's industrial approach of literature definitely opens up new avenues for literary studies. - Patrick Cattrysse, Translation (a transdisciplinary journal)
Murray's book offers a timely sociology and a political economy of the industry-topics that have been touched upon by scholars, yet, never so thoroughly or in such satisfying detail. As such, it provides an excellent and very useful synopsis of how we got here, as well as a platform for moving forward to a study of the industry that gives us the adaptations that are raison d'etre for what we do.- Joyce Goggin, Adaptation (international journal)
Murray has provided a compelling conceptual framework and richly-described account of the contemporary cultural economy. In particular, she dispenses with the notion that the prestige of the original work of fiction and the commercial success of its screen adaptation are somehow separate or at odds. Anyone with any lingering misconceptions about the often symbiotic relationship between economic and symbolic capital in the cultural field needs to read The Adaptation Industry-now. -Casey Brienza, London School of Economics Review of Books
Murray's key point is thought-provoking. With literary material now being produced in multifaceted ways, authorial reputation can draw audiences across media platforms in ways that are increasingly important for cultural success.[...] Books are part of a larger media economy, and The Adaptation Industry offers astute insights into how that economy works. -David Finkelstein, Times Literary Supplement
Simone Murray makes a major contribution to adaptation studies scholarship by developing a methodology focused on production-centered questions of how adaptations get made, rather than the field's more traditional interest in semiotic questions of how adaptations make meaning. Her method combines facets of book history, political economy, and cultural theory to arrive at a nuanced circuit model in the vein of Robert Darnton's famous approach to the book trade. Murray's circuit, however, focuses on the increasing convergence of media industries in the last thirty years, chiefly with respect to book and film productions, but also with the occasional nod towards comics and video games.[...] Thanks to her hybrid method, The Adaptation Industry will prove valuable to literary and film scholars as well as cultural and book historians. - Nico Dicecco, Simon Fraser University
Murray's work is designed to open the eyes of academics who have been trained in the worship of the book as autonomous, aesthetic reality and who still content themselves with comparing the texts with their cinematic counterparts in a sterile face-off. The adaptation industry is indeed a reality, and a flourishing one at that...Let's not mince words: The Adaptation Industry is likely to entirely restructure this field of research and thus redeem the status of adaptation studies as the poor cousin to literary and film studies. Several important works in the field have come out of the UK and US in recent years;...We can, however, consider Murray's The Adaptation Industry to be a pioneering work. -Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Critique
