If the past is a foreign country, Hollywood is another planet: they sure do things differently there. Just how differently is the predictable and tedious obsession of far too much adaptation scholarship, fixated on the degree of fidelity of a film to its adapted literary Urtext. This practice, boring and unimaginative, diverts the attention from what art can tell us about ourselves to what it can tell us about the colour of the breeches worn in the novel by that odd fellow in the twelfth chapter. Thomas Leitch, for one, is sick of it, and he has set out to shake up film scholarship and inject new life into the study of adaptation in this wide-ranging and acutely observed treatment.

Leitch, a prominent figure in American film studies, has recently developed a niche in the sub-discipline of literature-to-film adaptation. He has spent the last few years railing against the most simplistic approaches and encouraging those who look beyond specious questions of infidelity and transformation. I have seen him in action – engaging in good-natured but passionate debate with old friends and new colleagues alike – at the Literature/Film Association annual conference in the United States. Despite the cheerful urging of Leitch and his fellow travellers, though, critical practices are frustratingly slow to change. As he remarks in one of his endnotes: ‘Adaptation theorists regularly deplore the principle of using fidelity to a putative original as a measure of a given adaptation’s success even as many of them do exactly that themselves.’