Women Adapting: Bringing Three Serials of the Roaring Twenties to Stage and Screen

At the core of Bethany Wood's absorbing book, Women Adapting: Bringing Three Serials of the Roaring Twenties to Stage and Screen, lies what should be a self-evident claim: that adaptations, whether for stage or screen, emerge out of a complex process in which multiple individuals—not just a single author—participate. This process is shaped by specific historical, economic, and ideological conditions that “exert multidirectional pulls on [original] content” (209). And yet any cursory review of adaptation scholarship reveals that it generally neglects process and historical concerns, instead prioritizing analysis of the end-product in a vacuum. What gets forgotten or erased, Wood asks, when we stubbornly maintain this focus on textual analysis and fail to situate adaptations as the outcome of a historically determined process? For one, such methodology ignores the ways in which the industries commonly involved in adaptations—in the 1920s, this included periodical and book publishing, theater, and film—are...