Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

This book engages with Margaret Atwood’s work and its adaptations. Atwood has long been appreciated for her ardent defence of Canadian authors and her genre-bending fiction, essays, and poetry. However, a lesser-studied aspect of her work is Atwood’s role both as adaptor and as source for adaptation in media as varied as opera, television, film, or comic books. Recent critically acclaimed television adaptations of the novels The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu) and Alias Grace (Amazon) have rightfully focused attention on these works, but Atwood’s fiction has long been a source of inspiration for artists of various media, a seeming corollary to Atwood’s own tendency to explore the possibilities of previously undervalued media (graphic novels), genres (science-fiction), and narratives (testimonial and historical modes). This collection hopes to expand on other studies of Atwood’s work or on their adaptations to focus on the interplay between the two, providing an interdisciplinary approach that highlights the protean nature of the author and of adaptation.

This book traces the intertextual genealogy behind Netflix’s new series Ripley, directed by Steve Zaillian, and offers a critical examination of Tom Ripley’s enduring appeal across different media. As the series quickly climbs Netflix’s international charts, this volume provides a timely and insightful contribution to the Ripleyverse, exploring the character’s complex moral and sexual dimensions in today’s cultural context. McEntee investigates Ripley’s role within the televisual antihero genre, engaging with theories from Jason Mittell’s Complex TV and Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s The Antihero in American Television. While Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Ripley aims to generate empathy, this book contends that traditional frameworks for understanding antiheroes are insufficient. Instead, it introduces Eric Leake’s notion of “difficult empathy” as a more appropriate model for analyzing Scott’s Ripley, offering a fresh perspective on the character’s moral ambiguity. This contrasts sharply with Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation, where Matt Damon’s Ripley elicited a more straightforward emotional response. Readers will discover a nuanced discussion of how Ripley both adheres to and subverts the conventions of the antihero genre and comments self-reflexively on the process of adaptation. The book invites scholars and students of television studies, film, and literature to engage with these themes, providing a rich resource for understanding the evolving landscape of media narratives. Whether you are a scholar of media studies or a curious reader intrigued by the complexities of modern narratives, this book promises to deepen your understanding of the cultural significance of Tom Ripley’s latest iteration.