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Introduction to Adaptation
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Although screen adaptations of literature have been around since the beginning of cinema and have provoked the most intense debates among the public at large, the subject has been long neglected in literary and film studies. Up until a decade ago, adaptation was normally regarded as an area unworthy of sustained academic study. So why has it taken so long for a journal, such as this one, to be launched? We have come up with ten reasons.
- Champions of film, especially in the first half of the twentieth century saw the adaptation as impure cinema and resented the dependency of film on literature, especially during the period in which film was struggling to be regarded as the new literature, an art form in its own right.
- Writers and literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century considered film adaptations as abominations, crude usurpations of literary masterpieces that threatened
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