Adaptation Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 63–77 doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apm005 © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org 63 REVIEW ARTICLE Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads THOMAS LEITCH* After years of being stuck in the backwaters of the academy, adaptation studies is on the move. A decade’s worth of pioneering work by Brian McFarlane, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, James Naremore and Sarah Cardwell on the relation between film adaptations and their literary antecedents culminated in the publication of Robert Stam’s three volumes on adaptation, two of them co-edited with Alessandra Raengo, in 2004 and 2005. The monumental project of Stam and Raengo sought to reorient ad- aptation studies decisively from the fidelity discourse universally attacked by theorists as far back as George Bluestone to a focus on Bakhtinian intertextuality—with each text, avowed adaptation or not, afloat upon a sea of countless earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing—and this attempt was largely successful. If Stam and Raengo had any notion of settling the fundamental questions of adaptation studies, however, they must have been surprised to find that their impact was precisely the opposite. In- stead of redrawing the field, they have stirred the pot, provoking a welcome outburst of diverse work on adaptation. This essay seeks to map this latest round of work in four categories: collections of new essays, textbooks, monographs focusing on the relation between adaptation and appropriation and more general monographs on adaptation. Much of this latest work, as might be expected of writers on adaptation, is not wholly new. Ever since its inception half a century ago, adaptation studies has been haunted by concepts and premises it has repudiated in principle but continued to rely on in practice. The most obvious of these is prominently on display in the title of anthology by Cartmell and Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. What, we might ask, is literature on screen? If it is on screen, is it still literature? If it is literature, how can it be cinema as well? And why would anyone want to claim that it is both? Contemporary critics of adaptation who enshrine literature at the heart of their sub- ject increasingly find themselves grappling with the consequences of that decision. Cartmell and Whelehan assert in their Introduction that ‘it’s vital that literature and film be distinguished from literature on film’ and acknowledge that ‘the latter, the subject of this book, has historically privileged the literary over the cinematic’. They salute the ‘desire to free our notion of film adaptations from this dependency on literature so that adaptations are not derided as sycophantic, derivative, and therefore inferior to their literary counterparts’ (1–2). Yet they seem not to recognize the extent of the logical problems the phrase ‘literature on screen’ evokes. If Cambridge issued a companion to cinema in literature, readers would probably expect a collection or an analysis of stories that cited movies, and not a collection of prose fiction that was at the same time cinema in another form. But ‘literature on screen’ suggests something more capacious and de- fining than citation: the possibility that literary adaptations are at once cinema and literature.