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title: Adaptation and Appropriation
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This post forms part of my '[aspects of the novel](/2022/01/04/aspects-of-the-novel/)' collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive and worth consulting.

The novel is intricately bound to ideas of intertextuality. Many novels explicitly cite other works (consider Dickens citing Shakespeare in _Nicholas Nickleby_ or George Eliot's [many epigraphs](https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1391)).

The novel has also historically worked to bring voice to marginalized figures. For instance, Jean Rhys's _Wide Sargasso Sea_ (1966) gives the persepcective of Bertha Mason in _Jane Eyre_ while J. M. Coetzee's _Foe_ (1986) takes a fresh angle on _Robinson Crusoe_. Sena Jeter Naslund crafts a story, _Ahab's Wife_ (1999), from fleeting mentions of Captain Ahab's off-stage family in _Moby-Dick_. Marina Warner's 1992 _Indigo_ reimagines _The Tempest_ from a freshly re-gendered perspective. Peter Carey's _Jack Maggs_ (1997) gives a voice to Magwitch from Dickens's _Great Expectations_.

So-called shadow-texts occur in which novels echo others. Zadie Smith has called her _On Beauty_ (2005) a reworking of _Howard's End_. Will Self's _Dorian_ (2002) rewrites _A Pictyre of Dorian Gray_. Joyce's _Ulysses_ (1922) famously riffs on Homer and Hamlet.

These appropriations and rewritings are sometimes confused with plagiarism; Graham Swift's _Last Orders_ (1996) pays homage to Faulkner's _As I Lay Dying_ (1930), but some contemporary readers simply saw Swift's re-use as copying and unoriginal.

Novels themselves, of course, are frequently adapted to other media. Film and televisual remakes are common.

Further reading: Sanders, Julie, ‘Adaptation/Appropriation’, in _The Encyclopedia of the Novel_, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 1–9