Understanding Adaptation: Drama, Fiction, Film is an adaptation-studies textbook that contains 70 essays on 80 geographically diverse, historically significant novels, short stories, and plays that have been adapted to film. A comprehensive critical apparatus, together with bibliographies and an exhaustive index, supplements these model essays.

Written with university students (and possibly also advanced high school students) in mind, these critical essays cover some of the central works treated, and central issues raised, in today's adaptation-studies courses. Understanding Adaptation provides
students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills-in literature and theater as well as film studies. That is to say, almost all adaptation-studies texts are books about the methods and techniques (the theories, if you will) of adaptation and contain few, if any, actual analyses of fiction or drama into film. This casebook describes the methods and techniques of adaptation at the same time as it provides numerous examples of such analysis.


James R. Russo is an independent researcher who holds graduate degrees, including the doctorate, from the University of Richmond and Louisiana State University. He has taught at those schools as well as Tulane. Russo's primary scholarly interests are the cinema and comparative literature. He has edited or authored the following published books: Film Nation: William Troy
on the Cinema, 1933-1935; The Bookman: William Troy on Literature and Criticism, 1927-1950; Drama According to Alexander Bakshy, 1916-1946; Analyzing Film: A Student Casebook; and Pillars of Society: Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht.