Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Sophie Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies
Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Sophie Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 394 p. ISBN: 978-3-031-32133-7. 127 €
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1The scarcity of attention to illustration in adaptation studies is reflective of the cultural devaluing of illustrations in novels. This devaluing is outlined, and the value of paying attention to illustration in studies of adaptation demonstrated, in Kamilla Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), which provided a significant intervention in the field. Since Elliott’s monograph, Kate Newell’s Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization (2017) further reconceptualised adaptation studies by arguing for reading illustrations as adaptat ions themselves. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Sophie Aymes’s edited collection, Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies (2024), builds on these foundational works, revealing just how expansive the study of adaptation and illustration can be. Elliott and Newell are naturally present, both providing chapters while their earlier works are frequently cited by other contributors. Collectively, the authors in this collection build on the frameworks provided by Elliott’s and Newell’s monographs to extend and redirect the study of adaptation and illustration in exciting ways.
2As Wells-Lassagne and Aymes set out in their introduction, the collection takes an intermedial approach that seeks to not only develop understanding of adaptation but also to probe the varied forms of illustration and its boundaries by taking “into account the specific meaning of illustration when it is anchored to a text, as well as its expanded definition as a type of visual art that is no longer necessarily text-bound and has expanded beyond print” (6). The twelve proceeding chapters achieve this by each exploring distinct case studies that span a wide range of forms of illustration and related visual media. The studies of illustrations that are anchored in written texts concern illustrations that were produced in different cultural contexts from the “source” texts; for instance, Newell incisively analyses the ways in which Anna and Elena Balbusso’s twenty-first century illustrations for Pride and Prejudice and The Handmaid’s Tale interact inwardly with other visual adaptations of the novels and outwardly with contemporary contexts. Meanwhile, the studies of “parallel” illustrations that exist apart from the texts include analysis of those printed in almanacs (see Ann Lewis’ chapter) and magazines (Chris Louttit’s chapter) alongside an exploration of street murals (Nathalie Collé’s chapter). Moving beyond conventional definitions of illustration to adjacent forms and media, case studies include digital “apps” (Elliott’s chapter), photographic ekphrasis (Julie LeBlanc’s chapter), animation (Hélène Martinelli’s chapter) and comics (Carol Adlam’s chapter).
3By their nature, such diverse chapters combining a range of disciplinary perspectives provide different lenses through which to explore the interrelations of adaptation and illustration. However, certain key methodological underpinnings recur. In general, and following influential theorisations of adaptation that draw from poststructuralist theory, the authors adopt an approach that envisions adaptations existing as nodes in networks where they are in dialogue with other adaptations, related texts and cultural contexts. Within this approach, there is also a scrupulous attentiveness to the medium specificity of the various case studies, whether this be, for example, the ephemerality of street art or the haptic interactivity that apps can offer readers. Meanwhile, transcultural adaptation provides a recurring dimension in explorations of cultural context. Different facets are considered here, with Miriam de Paiva Vieira illuminating ways in which the illustrations in Brazilian adaptations of European fairy tales can perform a crucial role in transposing the stories to local spaces and identities while, remaining in Brazil, Camila Augusta Pires de Figueiredo examines the adaptation of The Little Prince to the Brazillian format of the cordel chapbook. Some of the contributors also foreground the negotiation of authorship in adaptation networks. For instance, David Pinho Barros’ analysis of illustrations based on frames of Yasujirô Ozu’s films draws out the ways in which the different artists under consideration recreate Ozu’s precise imagery in their own authorial manners and what their illustrations reveal about the renowned director’s style. Elsewhere, Xavier Giudicelli outlines Oscar Wilde’s collaboration with Henry-D. Davray on a French translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and analyses how, along with the ways in which artists Jean-Gabriel Daragnès and Jean-Georges Cornélius navigate the adaptation network in subsequent illustrated versions of this translation, these interactions between different authors “shed light on the rich Franco-British literary and artistic exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (234).
4The productive interplay of these core building blocks of the collection’s methodological framework is exemplified in Carol Adlam’s chapter. Adlam offers a fascinating account of applying adaptation theory in practice, detailing her process of adapting a “lost” Russian detective novel, Semyon Panov’s Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala (Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball, 1876) into a graphic novel, The Bobrov Affair. Adlam outlines how her own authorial approach to this transcultural adaptation involved situating the novel in a wider network of nineteenth century Russian literature while mediating between its original context and a twenty-first century lens. These considerations are furthered in Adlam’s analysis of how she utilised the visual and sequential specificities of the comics medium to realise this adaptation that both transforms and provides a commentary on its literary source.
5Appropriately, the volume itself also reproduces many of the illustrations and other visual artworks under analysis. While restrictions inevitably mean that not every image discussed can be reproduced, the contributors typically do an excellent job of describing key aspects of the visual art. This attention to detail in interpretive written analysis is another commendable feature unifying the chapters.
6Ultimately, each chapter in Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies offers a distinct and insightful perspective while contributing to an overarching exploration that enriches the field. As a whole, the collection invigorates and opens up understandings of what both adaptation and illustration constitute. The range of media, intermedial exchanges and transcultural interactions analysed indicate the breadth of the area of study when illustration is welcomed into adaptation studies and will hopefully inspire future works that further explore this space.
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James C. TAYLOR, « Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Sophie Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies », e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 19 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20775 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15cj9
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