Literary narratives have a long history of migrating from book format to other media, as the academic discipline of adaptation studies has documented since its emergence in the late-1950s. But adaptation studies almost always utilises a methodology of comparative textual analysis: contrasting a film/television adaptation with its originating novel/short story. This paper proposes reconfiguring adaptation studies by conceptualising adaptation as an industry—a complex network of authors, literary agents, editors, publishers, literary prize committees, film/TV producers and screenwriters. Adaptations are not discretely self-generating texts, but are rather brokered within this complex economy of institutions, agents and interests. The adaptation economy trades in two kinds of commodity: intellectual property rights, which are the basis of material value in the creative industries; and cultural capital, as the prestige of authors, agents, publishers, prizes and studios is augmented or tarnished by the success of specific book-to-screen adaptation projects. Using as a case-study the film adaptation (2005) of literary prize-winner Annie Proulx's ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (1997), this paper challenges adaptation's existing theoretical models. It argues for grounding adaptation studies firmly in the mechanics of the media industries. Simultaneously, this rethinking of the field enables media and book history scholars to better understand the importance of book content's migration to non-book formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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