‘Adapting Australia’
Special Issue of Adaptation, Oxford University Press

We encourage submission of articles for a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Adaptation (Oxford University Press), jointly edited by Ken Gelder (University of Melbourne) and Imelda Whelehan (University of Tasmania.

While adaptation studies has recently reflected on its own theoretical gaps and silences, little work has been produced on national literatures and cultures in adaptation beyond an Anglo-American framework. The purpose of this special issue is to gather perspectives on this topic: what happens when a nation reflects on its past through the adaptation of core narratives (novels, poems, memoirs, plays, films, myths, historical events, folktales, political and social movements, graphic narrative, etc)? Can changing notions of Australianness be charted through the process of adaptation; do they change a nation’s consciousness or do they more readily shore up the illusion of shared identity? What do Australian adaptations tell Australians about themselves, and who are excluded? What institutions act as gatekeepers for Australian adaptations and to what effect? What do Australian adaptations suggest to the world at large? The special issue title, ‘Adapting Australia’, invites creative interpretation. Adaptation was an important part of New Australian Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, as was explored in the 1993 Special Issue of Literature/Film Quarterly, edited by Brian McFarlane, and it is hoped that this volume will extend that early exploration of culture and identity in adaptation, to show how much adaptation studies has diversified and broadened over the past twenty years.

We invite proposals on any aspect of contemporary Australian adaptations, but suggestions include:

• (mis)appropriating the canon
• adaptation and Indigenous culture
• Screens and sounds: adaptation, audiobooks and music
• Post-literary adaptation: cartoons, games, oral narratives
• Horror adaptations
• Gendering adaptation
• Remakes/rewriting/rethinking Australia
• Crossmedia/transmedia storytelling
• Culture and adaptation industries: agents, institutions, copyright and funding
• Adaptation and fandom
• Costume and location
• Authorial/star discourse
• Screenwriting and script adaptation
• Theatrical adaptations

Please submit completed papers (up to 5000 words accompanied by a 150-word abstract) directly to the Adaptation website (Flagging submissions as intended for the special issue), and following the advice on online submission: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/adaptation/for_authors/ Manuscripts must be submitted online in an anonymous form and will be sent to at least two external reviewers. The deadline is 1 July 2014.