Emerging from Converging Cultures: Circulation, Adaptation, and Value

The play of value — or what I will call adaptive value — has always been a powerful underpinning of both adaptation practices and adaptation studies. By adaptive value I mean something fundamental: what makes an adaptation significant and important, or why does a particular adaptation matter? Historically this question has always been a dimension of any film adaptation, either intentionally or unintentionally, and, since at least the 1907 adaptation of Ben-Hur and the landmark copyright case it provoked, adaptations have generated and measured a myriad of values, ranging from the legal and economic to the aesthetic and moralistic. Indeed, as this range suggests, adaptive values have mapped, across different registers, the pervasive and often oblique ways in which ideology and politics have consistently infused the layered practices of cinematic adaptations from their production to their reception.