Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation

This book develops a new approach for the study of films adapted from canonical originals such as Shakespeares plays. Departing from the current consensus that adaptation is a heightened example of how all texts inform and are informed by other texts, this book instead argues that film adaptations of canonical works extend cinemas inherent mystification and concealment of its own artifice. Film adaptation consistently manipulates and obfuscates its traces of original authorial enunciation, and oscillates between overtly authored articulation and seemingly un-authored unfolding. To analyse this process, the book moves from a dialogic to a psychoanalytic poststructuralist account of film adaptations of Shakespeares plays. The differences between these rival approaches to adaptation are explored in depth in the first part of the book, while the second part constructs a taxonomy of the various ways in which authorial signs are simultaneously foregrounded and concealed in adaptations anamorphic drama of authorship.