The process of making a work of art upon the basis of elements provided by an

earlier work in a different, usually literary, medium; also the secondary work thus
produced. Literary works have been adapted in many forms: fairy tales as
ballets, plays as operas, novels as stage plays (see dramatization), stage plays
as novels or short stories. Since the early 20th century, new entertainment
media have encouraged the adaptation of plays and novels as films or as radio
(and later, television) dramas, and conversely the novelization of film or
television screenplays into books. Distinctions are commonly drawn between
faithful adaptations, in which the distinctive elements (characters, settings, plot
events, dialogue) of the original work are preserved as far as the new medium
allows, and free adaptations, sometimes called versions or interpretations, in
which significant elements of the original work are omitted or replaced by wholly
new material
(Oxford dictionary of literary terms)

Adaptation can be a transpositional practice, casting a specific genre into

another generic mode, an act of re-vision itself. It can parallel editorial practice in
some respects, indulging in the exercise of trimming and pruning; yet it can also
be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion and
interpolation []. Adaptation is frequently involved in offering commentary on a
sourcetext. This is achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from
the original, adding hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and
marginalized. Yet adaptation can also constitute a simpler attempt to make texts
relevant or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the
process of proximation and updating. This can be seen as an artistic drive in
many adaptations of so-called classical novels or drama for television and
cinema. Shakespeare has been a particular focus, a beneficiary even, of these
proximations or updatings.
(Julie Sanders: Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge: London and New York,
2006, pp. 18-19).

[] the disciplinary domains in which the term adaptation has proved most
resonant are biology and ecology. Following Charles Darwins presentation of his
controversial theories of evolution in the nineteenth century, the scientific
community has been endlessly fascinated with the complex processes of
environmental and genetic adaptation, from Darwins famous finches on the
Galapagos islands, whose variations in bill and beak type were an indicator of the
different foodstuffs they had adapted to eat in competition with one another, to
the peppered moth in British industrial cities, a melanism or darker variation on
the traditional species though to have developed to blend in with the blackened
surfaces caused by heavy industry in those areas. Adaptation proves in these
examples to be a far from neutral, indeed highly active, mode of being, far
removed from the unimaginative act of imitation, copying, or repetition that it is

sometimes presented as being by literature and film critics obsessed with claims
to originality.
(Julie Sanders: Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge: London and New York,
2006, p. 24).