ABSTRACT
George Bluestone tried it in Novels Into Film in 1957, and he has been followed by dozens of scholars over the last sixty years. Despite the best efforts of adaptation scholars to understand adaptations as artifacts with more or less objective elements, however, texts occasionally touch readers in ways that are idiosyncratic, emotional, and highly personal. Nico Dicecco reaches a similar moment in his essay "State of the Conversation: The Obscene Underside of Fidelity." He then suggests that a useful definition of adaptation might shift "away from what adaptation is and towards what adaptation does". In 2010 Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins published a collection of essays on adaptation. In the introduction to that collection, they argued that "a stubborn insistence on fidelity certainly has kept adaptation theory from maturing". The need for an understanding of adaptation that acknowledges reception is for authors less a theoretical matter and more a result of practical experience.
