Adapting the Australian Canon and Decolonizing the Tertiary Classroom: Settler Students Respond to Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife

The ‘Drover’s Wife Reading Group’ was a collaborative teacher–student project piloted between 2018 and 2020 at Federation University Australia with the intention to create spaces for decolonization, particularly settler (un)learning, beyond the limits of the tertiary English classroom. Drawing upon aspects of reader–response theory, the project began as a small constructivist study in that it sought, initially, to gauge the different responses undergraduate settler students had to a work of Indigenous Australian literary adaptation. However, the transformative nature of the text being engaged with – Leah Purcell’s play, The Drover’s Wife (2016), a literary work which has been widely recognized for the critical literacy it promotes – coupled with the sophistication of the participants’ various responses to it, quickly saw the project shift to one of intense collaboration, with the students involved becoming partners in shaping the project’s outcomes.

Transculturated Shakespeare: Malayalam cinema and new adaptive modes

Malayalam cinema offers a unique body of work for scholars seeking to understand the heterogenous traditions of Indian engagement with Shakespeare. In this article, after a brief overview of the history of Malayalam reception of Shakespeare generally, I focus on the film adaptations of director Jayaraj (Kaliyāttam / Othello [1997]; Kannaki / Antony and Cleopatra [2002]; and Veeram / Hamlet [2017]). Of particular relevance is Jayaraj’s interest in Shakespeare’s female characters, whom he reshapes by immersing his adaptation in the local practices and idioms of Kerala culture, thus transforming the Shakespearean play-text thoroughly. The article examines the influence especially of kathāprasangam upon Jayaraj to understand what aspects of Shakespeare endure in Jayaraj’s films and what are transformed. By approaching the question of adaptation from the perspective of the emic and the etic, an apparatus made influential by linguist-anthropologist Kenneth Pike in his analysis of a cultural text, I examine why, in Malayalam, cinematic Shakespeares have seen greater commercial and critical success than Shakespeare in translation or literary adaptation. The article seeks to understand this disparity by closely reading some of the recurrent patterns that emerge in Shakespeare transculturated in the two domains of Malayalam literature (including translation) and film.

Theodora Wilkin’s Wandering Soul

Sometime in the early eighteenth century, an Anglo-Dutch woman named Theodora Wilkin began translating into English an important Mennonite devotional work, Jan Philipsz Schabaelje’s Wandelende Ziele met Adam, Noach, en Simon Cleophas. Her translation (or, better, adaptation) survives in a manuscript of about one thousand pages. Wilkin’s text sheds considerable light on the state of intellectual history and literary adaptation in the early eighteenth century. Specifically, Theodora Wilkin’s Wandering Soul foregrounds three concerns. 1) It demonstrates the centrality of women to providential history. 2) It reconciles biblical wisdom and natural philosophical knowledge. 3) It closely considers the Ancients, both insofar as they reflected divine truth and promulgated idolatry.

Singing through Evil Times

Undaunted by the problems with Molly Brown, Willson plunged ahead with his next musical, Here’s Love. This chapter explores how Willson’s attempts to adapt the classic film Miracle on 34th Street into a stage musical presented a new challenge for him (it was his first literary adaptation) and also uses new archival documents to reveal the backstage tensions that blighted the production. The chapter shows how the original director Norman Jewison was replaced by the producer, Stuart Ostrow, who worked hard to turn the musical into a modest success, but the results were unimpressive compared to Willson’s previous shows. The chapter examines how the adaptation changes the gender dynamics between the two lead characters to its detriment, yet aspects of Willson’s adaptive innovations were arguably an improvement on the film.

Wprowadzenie do „Za kulisami” Cypriana Norwida

Kazimierz Braun introduces his stage adaptation of “Behind the Wings”, a drama considered the crowning achievement of the poet/playwright, Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). Behind the Wings is composed of two parts. The action of one part takes place in the 19th Century in Warsaw. The other is situated in ancient Greece around the 7th Century BC. Both parts are bound by the structure of “theatre within theatre”, popularized by Shakespeare in Hamlet. The Danish Prince uses the production of “The Murder of Gonzago” to unmask the murderer King. The hero of “Behind the Wings”, Omegitt, uses his play Tyrtaeus to unmask the moral degradation of his contemporaries. The action of the entire play (composed of these two parts) takes place in a theatre, where, during a carnival ball, among other attractions, “Tyrtaeus” is performed. “Behind the Wings”, as many of Norwid’s works, was not published during the author’s life time and was preserved with significant loopholes. Thus, for a production of this play the existing text must be adapted and transformed into a working scenario. The article discusses major obstacles which hinder the entrance to the great and complex dramatic edifice of “Behind the Wings” – such as the problems of the multitude of the characters, and the specific use of space and time by Norwid. In addition to the analysis of “Behind the Wings”, Kazimierz Braun recalls his own works on this play, beginning by his studies of Polish Literature at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and at the Directing Department, Warsaw’s School of Drama. During his long career he directed fifteen productions of Norwid’s texts, both in theatres and in television in Poland. A literary adaptation and a miseen- scène project of “Behind the Wings” prepared by Kazimierz Braun was published in a book: Cyprian Norwid, “Za kulisami”, opracowanie literackie i inscenizacyjne Kazimierz Braun, Wydawnictwo Pewne, Kielce 2021.

Developing Multi-Literacy Skills by Creating Graphic Story in Literature Class: A Project-Based Learning Approach

The research aims to develop multi-literacy skills by creating a literary graphic story as a creative and innovative way for English Department students in learning literature. By creating an adaptation from text to picture, students are expected to improve their ability to understand literary works and express their creative and innovative skills. This is a qualitative study implementing the Project-based Learning (PBL) approach in literature class, which aims to produce graphic stories as the output of studying literature. Students do not only understand the literary theories but also make something out of their understanding. The scaffolding instruction method was employed to examine practices of improving multiliteracy skills. A detailed action research plan, including preliminary observation in the classroom, action plan, intervention, and guiding, is applied. The investigation related to the barriers in doing the project is going to be conducted as well. Reader Response criticism is introduced to students in the reading and analyzing stage as a useful method to develop their critical thinking in evaluating the literary works they read. We argue that the students improve their reading skills, writing skills and producing graphic story stories based on their own interpretation of the literary text, which is proven by the summary and conversation texts they produce in the graphic stories. They also develop their creativity by producing images and pictures as the result of the literary adaptation process. There are two significant outcomes of the project: developing literary text understanding as well as producing the original graphic story.

Merwin’s Ecopoetic Conservancy

Merwin’s efforts to conserve Earth help us understand his recuperation of poetic form in the later poetry. After deploying traditional poetic devices such as meter and rhyme to voice the ideology he opposed in his middle period, Merwin came to renew traditional form to echo his commitment to preindustrial human symbiosis with the environment—an indigenous consilience. Merwin understood literary adaptation through translation as rooted in a selfless ethics of stewardship. In this renewal, Merwin was never sanguine about salvation through traditional forms of writing or living but remained elegiac in his love and care for what is disappearing from our ecosystems.

The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations

When in 1905 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for outstanding services as an epic writer’, it was his novel Quo vadis. A Narrative of the Time of Nero that motivated the committee to bestow this notable honour. The extraordinary international success of Quo vadis catapulted the author into literary stardom, placing him at the top of international league tables for the sheer quantity of his readers. But, before long, the historical novel began to detach itself from the person of its author and to become a multimedial, mass–culture phenomenon. In the West and East, Quo vadis was adapted for the stage and screen, provided the inspiration for works of music and other genres of literature, was transformed into comic strips and illustrated children’s books, and was cited in advertising and referenced in everyday objects of material culture. No work in English to date has explored in depth the mechanisms that released Quo vadis into mass circulation and the influence that its diverse spin-off forms exercised on other areas of culture—even on the reception and interpretation of the literary text itself. In the context of a robust scholarly interest in the processes of literary adaptation and classical reception, and set alongside the recent emergence of interest in the ‘Ben-Hur tradition’, this volume provides a coherent forum for a much-needed exploration, from various disciplinary and national perspectives, of the multimedial transformations of Quo vadis. Uniquely, also, for its English-speaking readers this collection of essays renders more visible the cultural conquests achieved by Poland on the world map of classical reception.

Transnational co-production, multiplatform television and My Brilliant Friend

Rai/HBO co-production L’Amica Geniale/ My Brilliant Friend (2018–) provides an illuminating example of changing strategies for transnational drama co-production in television’s burgeoning ‘multiplatform’ era. Foregrounding institutional over textual analysis, the article places My Brilliant Friend ( MBF) within the industrial, creative and cultural contexts that have facilitated it. Important to these contexts is that transnational co-productions between non-US broadcasters and US-based premium networks are not only increasing but also exhibiting a new degree of cultural diversity. The article examines MBF’s origination as a literary adaptation, its genesis as a ‘cross-platform’ co-production, and its exemplification of changing drama commissioning strategies for Rai and HBO.

Fanfic as adaptation: The Phantom of the Opera case

This article discusses the theoretical borders that separate adaptations of literary texts (by professional writers) and the activities of fans, especially fanfictions of The Phantom of the Opera. The theoretical approach brings the notion of “transcreation” and authors from the field of fan studies. The results include the recognition of fanfictions as a type of literary adaptation, and the notion of The Phantom of the Opera as an archive or as “archontic literature”.