Adaptation and Illustration

Illustration has a varied life as a mode of adaptation. From frontispieces that concentrate an entire work into a single visual to magazines and editions brimming with illustrations on every page, illustrations contribute to our collective understanding of how a particular work “looks” and of its significance within the cultural landscape. Consistent to all illustrations, though, regardless of number or placement, is the ability to concretize the particulars of a text, to prioritize particular ways of seeing and reading, and to establish and reinforce the visual and thematic symbolism of the novels in which they appear.

In this chapter, I explore the ways in which illustrations utilize patterns of visualization established within existing adaptation histories to reinforce modes of seeing a given text, and the ways in which illustrations broaden intertextual networks, specifically by connecting works to broader spheres of texts and meanings. To demonstrate these complementary lines best, I turn to two suites of illustrations created by the twin sister team of Anna and Elena Balbusso for the Folio Society: one for the 2013 edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and the second for the 2012 edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. As I argue, the strategies that the Balbussos have adopted in approaching these two very different novels reflect distinct yet related processes of adaptation and visual communication.

This chapter probes the interface between illustration and adaptation via literary murals with a view to assessing the transmediality of both the illustrative and adaptive processes which such murals imply. It does so by providing a case study focusing on the Gulliverian murals in Dublin, Zagreb, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Altogether, these murals testify to the extensive and lasting reach of Swift’s literary classic, as well as to its capacity to elicit multifarious responses. Individually, they constitute samples of artistic creation whose aesthetic dimension is very often accompanied by a social and/or political agenda which naturally varies from place to place and from artist to artist. Literature-inspired street murals are indeed pieces of public art which express individual as well as collective responses to literary texts, whose creation usually implies commissions by city councils and work by the community, and which spark varied public reactions—not so much to the source texts they illustrate, but rather to these texts’ interpretations by street artists and the messages these artists try to convey through their murals in specific places and times. They are therefore illustrations/adaptations with a political scheme and a social impact, and re-appropriations of literary texts, characters, or motifs which are time-, place- and community-based rather than purely aesthetically minded and totally literature-dependent.

This chapter focuses on Chodowiecki’s illustrations for Rousseau’s bestselling novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), which appeared in the Genealogischer Calender auf das Jahr 1783 (the calendar of the Berlin Academy). These images with their captions provide rich material for analysing the complex relationship between illustration and adaptation at various levels. As is the case for all of the (many) series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations for Julie, they visually transpose key moments from the epistolary novel, in a complex intermedial encounter (especially intricate since the novel itself already strongly evokes the tableau and the engraving through the use of textual description). Appearing twenty years after the novel’s first publication, and within a German, rather than French, context, the images produce a strikingly original interpretation of the novel, as critics have noted. However, Chodowiecki’s engravings, produced in tiny format for the almanac, were also unusual because the images and their captions were, in this context, viewed independently from the text of origin, unlike most of the other series of illustrations for the novel (these were usually bound opposite the relevant textual passages). Indeed, perhaps because of their tiny size, Chodowiecki’s illustrations are almost never found within editions of the novel. Furthermore, within the almanac, the images are viewed alongside each other (one after the other) rather than being dispersed through the pages of several volumes, generating a range of possible readings. Here, the images are no longer necessarily viewed as the illustration of specific episodes from the novel, but can also be seen as an independent ‘progress’, or as a series of almost autonomous ‘genre scenes’, in which the anchoring function of the captions tying the images to the novel itself becomes indeterminate. When considering illustration as a form of adaptation, the production and display of images in the almanac context opens up a number of questions about the (shifting) relationship between text and image which I explore in this chapter.

This chapter discusses how the interactive illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland made possible by mobile software application technologies of the 2010s both depart from and continue the traditions of paper pop-up books, how they change the ways in which consumers engage with illustrated literature, the anxieties that these changes have produced, how they continue the rhetoric of earlier discourses regarding new media forms and technologies, and how designers and developers of Alice ad-app-tations also continue the rhetoric of earlier adaptation discourses amid new technologies. The chapter concludes by envisioning what new adaptation discourses such interactive apps enable. Apps discussed include Alice for the iPad (Atomic Antelope, 2010), Alice in New York (Atomic Antelope, 2011), Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham (A1000castles, 2014) the Alice App (Emmanuel Paletz Corporation, 2015), Wonderland AR (Live Animations Corporation, 2017), and Alice in Wonderland AR Quest (Avatarico LLC, 2017).

Although examples of paintings and drawings based on film frames abound in the history of illustration, notably in the field of poster production, a recent trend has offered new ontological challenges to intermedial theory. In fact, in recent years several illustrators have produced decontextualized interpretations of film frames, which are commercialised with total independence from the original theatrical marketing endeavour of the films and are sold as autonomous art pieces. The work of one particular filmmaker has been consistently adapted into illustration throughout the last decade: Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu, known, among other stylistic idiosyncrasies, for his obsession with narrative and compositional economy, as well as for his perfectionist approach to framing. This chapter looks at how the graphic artists Adrian Tomine, Bren Luke, and Jochen Gerner propose a unique look on the Japanese director’s compositional style. It shows that their approach seems to be absolutely unanimous as to the detection and use of certain characteristics of the filmmaker’s oeuvre which they try to import, and which gives origin to a formal proximity of all three to clear line aesthetics.

As a genetic critic interested in word and image relationships in the illustrated manuscripts of various writers and artists, I find myself confronted regularly with the theoretical ramifications of the theories of illustrations, intermediality, photography, ekphrasis and adaptation in my quest to analyze the complexities of my literary corpus of unpublished and published autobiographical narratives punctuated with images. My attention is focused on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographic/photographic production. I reference the hand-written manuscripts of her memoir (Les Années/The Years) her “Photographic Diary” (Écrire la vie) illustrated with numerous family photos, and the intermedial theatrical adaptation of The Years, to trace the metamorphosis of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrasis from one text to another and from one medium to another. I argue that ekphrasis adapts images into words, and is a form of intermedial reference that can have illustrative functions and engages the “dynamics common to all modes of adaptation” (Newell, Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In the Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. Oxford University Press, 2017).

Illustration and adaptation may be seen as two modalities of intersemiotic translation. However, their connection has not been as extensively studied as the numerous studies devoted to the relationships between literature and cinematographic adaptations. Indeed, one might suggest that illustration is a possible avenue for this more popular subject of study, given that, in addition to the homology between both processes, many filmmakers developed their graphic universes based on their predecessors’ illustrations. This is the case for the Czech animated film director Karel Zeman, whose Deadly Invention (Vynález Zkazy, also known as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, 1958) is less an adaptation of Jules Verne’s Facing the Flag (Face au drapeau, 1896) than a movie inspired by all the engravings from Hetzel’s editions of his Extraordinary Journeys (Voyages extraordinaires).

To what extent does this phenomenon drive the dynamics of adaptation toward animation cinema or mixed technique? Is it more likely to overcome the media gap, by using not only real shots, but also drawings, which are common to books and animated films? The adaptation process differs when it starts from an iconotext or even from a technical and material support through a direct animation of the pages. It can go as far as challenging the “transcendent criterion of the canonical text” when it gives priority to a “visual fidelity” or a “fidelity to the spirit of the medium”. Thus, the metaphorical “Great Image-Maker” who is supposed to “turn the pages of the album” (as it happens, the movie) finds here a literal embodiment.

This chapter presents and discusses an ongoing project of adaptation and cultural translation. The source-text is a Russian-language novella: Tri suda, ili Ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball] (1876). I am the translator, writer and illustrator of the graphic novel adaptation of this work, which is commissioned by the project “Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts to New Media” led by Dr Claire Whitehead (University of St Andrews), and which will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2024, under the title The Russian Detective. The chief “red herring” to which my title refers is the idea of a stable source text on which ideas of “authenticity” or accuracy depend. The source text is not well known and has not previously been translated. It is also incomplete, narratively inconsistent and digressive, and the physical text itself is incomplete. The unstable status of the source text allows me to make connections to the wider contemporaneous literary and social context of which it was a part. I have done this in a number of ways, the main one of which is by introducing a key plot-twist involving incest between the murderer and her brother/father. While this narrative strand is not present in the original text, it speaks to a far wider context in which father-daughter incest was a commonplace of Russian nineteenth-century crime fiction. I also resist the presumption of accuracy in the artwork by using anachronistic paratextual symbols (e.g. period dress, ersatz censors’ stamps, records, and other marginalia) in order to invite reflection on the created nature of the world depicted. I conclude that the graphic novel enables new forms of knowledge about the literary and socio-political contexts of its source material, and through which a range of assumptions about the period and genre can be challenged.

The aim of this chapter is to offer a reflection on the relationships and intersections between the realms of adaptation, illustration, and translation. My hypothesis is that translation may help us conceptualise the links between adaptation and illustration and that affinities may exist between the acts of linguistic and intermedial translation. Both are forms of transpositions or adaptations, performed through the superimpositions of filters and the weaving of rich intertextual/interpictorial networks, sparking dialogues between both cultures and media, and thus forming rhizomes. The chapter focuses on French transpositions—in both text and image—of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), the last text that Oscar Wilde published in his lifetime. The “transcription” of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Henry D. Davray (first published by the Mercure de France publishing house in May 1898) is one of the best documented cases of collaboration between Wilde and one of his translators. The chapter reconstructs the cultural networks behind the translation and subsequent illustration of Wilde’s Ballad, offering a glimpse into the rich Franco-British cultural exchanges in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It subsequently analyses Davray’s collaboration with Wilde on the translation of The Ballad and dwells on the discussions around the idea of turning Wilde’s Ballad into a prose poem in French, a form of domestication, or transcultural adaptation. It eventually compares and contrasts the two earliest French illustrated versions of Reading Gaol, both based on Davray’s prose translation and prefaced by Davray: a 1918 edition with woodcuts by Jean-Gabriel Daragnès and a 1927 edition containing coloured plates by Jean-Georges Cornélius. The cross-examination of those verbal and visual translations of The Ballad of Reading Gaol enables me to show how illustration can indeed be seen as a form of adaptation, a process of re-vision and (re-)interpretation.

The European oral tradition of fairy tales has been revisited through all sorts of transmediation processes, such as interlingual translations, rewritings, illustrations and adaptations. Mazza Edições, a Brazilian publishing house that aims at bringing the “best of Brazilian and African-Brazilian culture to their readers”, has released a collection of five children’s books that combines all the mentioned medial procedures. Seeking the empowerment of Brazilian children who are not able to mirror themselves in previous transmediations of Rapunzel, Goldilocks and the Three Little Bears, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and Tom Thumb, Cristina Agostinho, Ronaldo Coelho and Walter Lara produced Rapunzel e o Quibungo (2012), Afra e os três lobos-guarás (2013), Joãozinho e Maria (2013), Cinderela e Chico Rei (2015), and O pequeno polegar (2019). The geographical and sociocultural environments of the traditional oral tales are (re)located by the Agostinho and Coelho’s writings. Nevertheless, it is through Lara’s illustrations that the readers are likely to culturally engage with the adaptations, since they not only supplement the plot events of the sources, but mainly transform the long-lasting Caucasian features of the characters. The aim of this chapter is, therefore, to discuss how the indissoluble relations between word and image make the investigated media products genuine cases of “repetition with variation”.

From its origins in novel-to-film studies, adaptations have come to designate a phenomenon that involves not only an increasingly broad range of distinct media, but also different transformative processes. Instead of the type of adaptation process that is known as medial transposition, which comprises the transference from one medium to a different one (Rajewsky 2005), this essay focuses on the notion of adaptation as the transposition from one cultural field to another. This idea of transcultural adaptation, also present in Hutcheon (On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’—Biologically. New Literary History 38 (3): 443–458, 2007; Moving Forward: The Next Stage in Adaptation Studies. In Adaptation and American Studies: Perspectives on Research and Teaching, ed. Nassim Winnie Balestrini, 214–218. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag, 2011), Sanders (Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006), and Stam (Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. In Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore, 54–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), among others, emphasizes the importance of cultural contexts in adaptations by highlighting the use of circumstantial elements as a “movement of proximation” to the audience’s personal frame of reference (Sanders 2006). While cultural translations corroborate with the notion of adaptation as intertextuality as a means for the construction of expanded adaptive networks (Newell, Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), they also bring the fields of adaptation and translation studies together, as they suggest that the transposition of a text to a different audience means adapting on both semiotic and linguistic levels (Fehrle and Schmitt, Introduction: Adaptation as Translation: Transferring Cultural Narratives. Komparatistik Online, 1–7 (Special Issue Adaptation as Cultural Translation). Accessed 5 June 2022. https://​www.​komparatistik-online.​de/​index.​php/​komparatistik_​online/​issue/​view/​15).

This chapter examines the adaptation of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince by Josué Limeira, with illustrations by Vladimir Barros, considering the notion of transcultural adaptation. In this version the famous story has been adapted to Brazilian northeastern culture with changes on both semiotic and linguistic levels, taking into account the conventions of cordel. On the linguistic level, the analysis concentrates on the transformation of Saint-Exupéry’s story in terms of rhyming and metric schemes; and, on the semiotic level, the transformations in terms of the choice of elements illustrated as well as the style of illustrations. By doing this, I underline the phenomenon of adaptation as a process that brings not only different media but also different cultures in contact.