ABSTRACT
The 'new' fidelity is just as dependent as the 'old' fidelity on subjective, evaluative, and critically problematic terms such as 'deeper', 'genuine', 'essence', and 'spirit'. This chapter argues that adaptation studies represent an ideal critical ground from which to question, confront, and begin to move beyond Romanticism's outmoded definitions of originality. It looks at the act and performance of adaptation, offering the critical opportunity, as Leitch puts it, to grapple with the thorny questions of just what constitutes originality. That necessitates a move away from well-landscaped definitions of originality that rely on binary rhetoric: source/copy, original/derivative, pure/contaminated. The fidelity-niche of adaptation studies is the last academic holdover of the New-Critical urge to read literary texts (in the case of adaptation studies, 'sources') as transcendental signifieds, to position texts as fundamentally authentic, original, self-identical. The traditional critical positioning of the spirit underwritten and fueled by originality was shaped and developed in the Romantic period.
