ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which literary adaptation can become an occasion for cross-cultural reflection on the effects of globalization and the enmeshed web of economic exchanges it posits. It takes as a case study the playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Snow in Midsummer (2015), a project commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) as the inaugural production in RSC’s Chinese Classics Translations Project, a multi-decade, collaborative endeavor among scholars, translators, and playwrights to translate classical Chinese plays into English and Shakespeare’s canon into Mandarin. Using Derrida’s notion of the revenant, this chapter traces the ways in which we can approach adaptation as forms of mourning, thus providing a space where the dead can make demands on the living.
