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BOBC |
Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Oppolzer2012a Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Classics Illustrated", "Frankenstein", Didactics, Shelley. Mary, USA Creators: Coelsch-Foisner, Markus, Oppolzer, Schendl Publisher: Braumüller (Wien) Collection: Transfer in English Studies |
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Attachments | URLs https://www.academ ... ein_through_Comics |
Abstract |
Based on Linda Hutcheon's seminal study A Theory of Adaptation (2006), this paper explores one of her central tenets,that the "contexts of creation and reception are material, public, and economic as much as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic". Using comics adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as the corpus for this enquiry, I will show that artistic considerations are, indeed, just one of several factors that have an impact on these intermedial transfers. A key to a better understanding of these comics is their almost exclusive reception in educational contexts. Therefore it becomes necessary to complement a structural analysis with both a diachronic and synchronic look at the particular circumstances under which these comics have been produced. The obvious starting point is the Russian-born entrepreneur Albert Kanter (1897–1973), who launched a series of comic book adaptations in the United States, entitled Classic Comics (renamed Classics Illustrated in 1947), which ran for thirty years, between 1941 and 1971. Ruth A. Roche and Robert Hayward Webb's adaptation of Frankenstein (1945) is a prime example of the sometimes contradictory demands of artists, publishers, teachers, and teenage readers, a conflict that is mirrored in the great number of contemporary adaptations. The English National Curriculum strongly recommends the use of multimodal adaptations of literary classics to promote critical reading. However, comics are almost exclusively employed to teach literacy and literature to low-ability learners, who would have great difficulties understanding the original texts. A survey of the titles available reveals that many of these books are, in fact, neither comics nor adaptations in Linda Hutcheon's sense, but graded readers with plenty of illustrations. The output of such compromised comics adaptations becomes understandable under these circumstances, but it also signals a lack of interest in more sophisticated titles on part of the readers, who, in this case, are mostly teachers.
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