Pockets of change: adaptation and cultural transition

The twelve essays collected in Pockets of Change locate adaptation within a framework of two overlapping, if not simultaneous, creative processes: on the one hand, adaptation is to be understood as an acknowledged transposition of an existing source-that is, the process of adapting from; on the other hand, adaption is also a process of purposeful shifting and evolving of creative practices in response to external factors, including but not limited to other creative works-in other words, the process of adapting to.

This book explores adaptation, then, as an active practice of repetition and as a reactive process of development or evolution.

The essays also extend beyond the production, transformation, and interpretation of texts to interrogate the values and practices at work in cultural transition and transformation during periods of social and historical change.

Collectively, the papers theorize adaptation by taking on three tasks: first, to examine the conditions under which the two processes of adaptation operate; second, to give an account of the space and moment in which the processes unfold (the 'pockets' of the title); and finally, to examine what emerges from pockets of adaptation.

While adapting from and adapting to are both processes that appear to preclude innovation in the way that they acknowledge and depend on external sources, Pockets of Change demonstrates that adaptation is productive.

It not only references prior texts, attitudes, practices and media, but it also invites us to re-visit the past and to re-think the present in new ways, potentially giving narrative space to muted or occluded voices.

This book therefore brings together an innovative and varied range of approaches to, interpretations and uses of adaptation, challenging the assumption that an adaptation is simply either a 're-make' or the act of turning one medium into another.

Adaptation, then, names not only the means by which texts are transformed, but also the space in which that transformation takes place.

This anthology highlights the processes of adaptation and transition rather than simply focusing on the relationship between beginning and end products.

In identifying these pockets of change this anthology both claims and opens up new spaces in this critical field and mode of textual analysis.