Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, was a tremendous success and the source of intense polemic when it first appeared in 1852. Since then, the novel has never entirely disappeared from the scene and has remained the locus of heated discussion on the representation of race and on race relations in the United States. This chapter will attempt to trace the role Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe’s novel, but also its rewritings, tie-ins, and adaptations – has played in discussions of race in the United States since the 1850s. The first part will investigate the inception of the novel, its strategies, publishing circumstances, and immediate reception. The second part will focus on the afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in terms of scholarly commentary and popular appropriations.

This chapter surveys the major scholarly and popular culture responses to the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, to a lesser extent, to Zelda Fitzgerald, between 2000 and 2020. The first part of the chapter discusses the films, TV and radio adaptations, stage and ballet versions, and novels based on Fitzgerald’s works or on the Fitzgeralds’ lives. The second part deals with the book-length scholarship and criticism on Fitzgerald’s life and work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which has greatly increased and expanded in this period in both subject matter and approach, partially because of the international conferences sponsored by The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, because of the annual issues of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, which began publication in 2002, and because of the completion, in 2019, of the eighteen-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The material in this second part of the chapter is divided into sections on Bibliographies and Other Reference Works, Editions, Correspondence, Biography, and Criticism, with the latter sub-divided into General Studies – Collections, General Studies – Full-Length Works, and Studies of Individual Works.

Adaptations and continuations come in different shapes and sizes. Some come in book form, though not all are novels – there are comics, poems, and much more besides. Some rework material for the stage, screen, or other transmedia outlets. Some will appear under a new name, that of the adapter or sequelist, but some will be authentic-seeming plagiarisms. Robinson Crusoe abridgements followed within weeks of the original book’s first appearance in 1719. Questions about literary property or paternity rights (the main metaphors used in eighteenth-century copyright debates) raise further questions about what exactly is being continued and what we mean by continuation with unstable, unfinished, or orphaned texts. At least six different reworkings of Roxana (1724) circulated in the half century after its initial publication. Running to seven editions within two years of its first publication, Moll Flanders (1722) also coexisted throughout the eighteenth century in multiple iterations with starkly different, often abrupt endings.

This chapter discusses the property and principles of adaptive trial designs. Adaptive trial designs refer to trial designs that offer pre-planned opportunities to modify the design of an ongoing trial based on accumulating trial data. Decisions for potential adaptations are made during the trial based on interim data, but flexibilities in adaptive trial designs are established and outlined in the study documents before any patient is recruited. For statistical planning, a simulation-guided approach is often used to evaluate the statistical properties of the design. It is generally required to demonstrate control of false positive rates for the regulatory, ethics, and funding bodies. Measures to mitigate and plan for operational bias and complexity in adaptive trial designs are needed.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Salman Rushdie’s works have been adapted for stage, screen, and radio. Focusing on adaptations of Midnight’s Children for the RSC, Haroun and the Sea of Stories for the National Theatre, radio versions such as Midnight’s Children for BBC Radio Four, a proposed Netflix serialization of the novel, as well as its film adaptation, this chapter considers the pitfalls and strengths in the processes of adaptation, on which Rushdie has written himself on the occasion of his writing the screenplay for the novel for Deepa Mehta’s film adaptation. The chapter considers also the audiobook versions of major novels, such Art Malik’s reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh or Rushdie’s own reading of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West, and some of the failed adaptions, such as Raul Ruiz’s attempt to produce a film of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In so doing, the chapter considers the transposition of Rushdie’s work into other media and highlights how their unique originary artistic forms make them a difficult adaptive proposition.

Organisms carry a large number of adaptive traits, i.e., traits that enable them to obtain resources and acquire sex partners from their social, biotic, and abiotic environments, and escape the negative factors of these environments. When we recognize an adaptive trait, we typically assume that it is a product of some form of selection, either of natural selection sensu stricto (environmental selection, as, for example, legs and eyes), sexual selection (e.g., antlers or peacock tail), or parental selection (e.g., the colorful interior of the beak of altricial birds’ nestlings). In many cases, the attribution of a biological function to the trait is simple and straightforward. However, even in such cases, we can be wrong – a particular trait could be an exaptation rather than an adaptation or it could be a by-product of processes other than selection. Sometimes we are not able to recognize what function a trait has for its bearer. The trait, including a behavioral pattern, can be a product of the manipulative activity of a biological entity other than the entity we suspect, usually another member of its species or a parasite. Besides, many traits are products of the organism’s own genes but help to spread their own copies at the expense of the biological fitness, viability, or fecundity of their carrier. A trait can also be a product of a different selection process. A trait might be a product of group selection or species selection, for example. Certain complex traits evolved only to keep an old biological adaptation in a functional state, not to evolve a new useful adaptation. And, finally, a trait can fulfill a function that was useful for the ancestors of the present organism but is not useful for the organisms that we study now. Similarly, a particular trait can be useful under special and rare conditions that are unknown to or otherwise not taken into consideration by the researcher.

Autistic children, adolescents, and adults face additional challenges, which means that for some, there may be an increased risk of developing mental health problems. These challenges can include difficulties with social skills and relationships, coping, rumination, executive functioning, inflexibility and tolerating uncertainty, sensory issues, and alexithymia. There is increasing evidence that cognitive-behavioral therapy can help with mental health problems when adapted appropriately to meet the needs of autistic children, adolescent, and adults. A variety of adaptions to cognitive-behavioral therapy for autistic people are presented and discussed within this chapter, which include changes to help with sensory issues, structures and routines, communication, social skills, emotions, circumscribed interests, cognitive and behavioral components of therapy, including psychoeducation and homework, as well as the inclusion of parents, family members, and carers within therapy.

This extended analysis of The Penelopiad, an alternative “herstory” to Homer’s Odyssey, and Hag-Seed, a radical rewriting of The Tempest staged in a Canadian men’s prison, deals with Atwood’s revisionary practices as she redeploys classic texts for her own purposes. Referencing Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this discussion foregrounds these texts as Atwood’s most sustained adaptation projects, exploring how such revisions involve authorial decisions around purpose, fidelity, commentary, appropriation, and autonomy. Discussion of The Penelopiad centers on Atwood’s reflections on the nature of myth in its contemporary interpretations and on her feminist politics of narrative representation, while Hag-Seed offers a different revisionary perspective with its emphasis on the figure of the author-artist-magician, personified in the theatre director, Prospero’s double. Crossing genre boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow, Atwood exploits the appeal of popular genres while retaining the resonance of literary fiction.

Addressing recent screen productions of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice (dir. Langton, BBC1, 1995; dir. Wright, 2005), and 1815 novel Emma (dir. Lawrence, ITV, 1996; dir. McGrath, 1996), Maribeth Clark explores the function of music, dance, drama and visuals in specific danced divertissements. She focuses on choreographed versions of social dance scenes set to the late-seventeenth-century music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries up to the late eighteenth century. Her chapter describes an impulse towards unity and congruence, towards the establishment of a stable repertoire, a conservative tradition – a canon that builds on the work of those involved in the twentieth-century English country dance revival.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

Decadent works, decadent themes, and decadent personalities figure prominently in the history of film, not only because of screen adaptations of novels and plays (there are at least three versions of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and many more adaptations of Wilde’s plays), but also because of the proliferation of decadent themes and types, especially in the silent era. Examples include Theda Bara’s vamp persona and the frequent use of decadent settings for the silent mise-en-scène, such as pre-WWI Vienna in Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928). Two key periods of decadence ? the Roman Empire and libertine France ? form the bases of the two modern films most identified with decadence: Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Some critics refer to Salò as the ‘last art film’ in cinema history, an assessment that reflects a sense that cinema itself has since entered a period of decadence. But time and again, some filmic form of ‘decadence’ has actually helped to enliven cinema and ensure its continuing artistic value.