Lissette Lopez Szwydky makes two helpful interventions in Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: she invites adaptation-studies scholars to pay more attention to the long history of adaptation and, thereby, to avoid a too-narrow focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century film and television adaptations of novels. And, conversely, she asks nineteenth-century literary studies scholars to consider the useful insights of adaptation studies: namely, that we might think about literary texts not as preceding or primary to adaptations on the stage, illustrations, merchandise, and so on but rather as facets of collective entities, “culture-texts,” a term she adopts from the work of Paul Davis and Brian Rose (17). Culture-texts, Szwydky explains, are “characters and storyworlds [that] exist primarily because they have been built through a vast network of adaptations over time. These numerous adaptations make up the culture-text, and the culture-text belongs to everyone (creators and consumers alike)” (18). This approach enables readers to see contemporary multimedia storytelling ventures such as the Star Wars franchise, for example—a multifaceted narrative world that includes films, novels, graphic novels, live-action and animated TV, and merchandise, as well as numerous related fan practices (fan fiction and art, cosplay, etc.)—as analogous to, indeed, arising from the nineteenth century’s adaptational practices. As Szwydky demonstrates, these practices encompassed vast swathes of nineteenth-century culture: serialized novels spawned multiple, simultaneous dramatic interpretations, even as the novels themselves continued their serial instalments; visual and literary artists frequently took their inspiration from prior works in multiple genres; and an industry in literary-themed merchandising blossomed as entrepreneurs cashed in on the expanding market for more and more “collectible” versions of popular culture-texts.Szwydky undertakes to show that these adaptational practices did not merely follow a few high-profile figures (e.g., Dickens, Shakespeare) whose exemplary works encouraged imitation, but rather encompassed innumerable cultural products by the famous and not-so-famous. Her approach invites us to consider the similarities between the hack dramatist churning out stage adaptations of popular novels and the “high-brow” artist converting poetry and prose to image (e.g., artists such as William Holman Hunt and John William Waterhouse who produced visual renditions of Keats’s poems or Pre-Raphaelites’ fascination with Arthuriana). The book’s central claim, that “adaptation doesn’t resuscitate literature; it is a galvanizing force that drives storytelling” (3), is a provocative and productive one. Likewise, her transhistorical approach, which “links the past and the present through the prevalent cultural practice of adaptation in order to rethink the future of literary history and adaptation studies” (3), is one that will be of use to adaptation studies and nineteenth-century studies scholars alike.Methodologically, Szwydky draws most heavily on theorists of adaptation studies, such as Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, and Kamilla Elliott, and theorists of fan studies, such as Henry Jenkins, applying their insights about contemporary practices to the cultural milieu of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the service of this methodology, she deliberately eschews close readings of specific texts as “case studies,” opting instead to provide a broad overview drawn from multiple examples, thereby underscoring the networked nature of adaptation. She highlights multifarious nodes in these adaptational networks rather than privileging any particular text (or author as the source of that text). Szwydky’s introduction makes an incisive and persuasive pitch for her approach. In chapter 1 she provides an overview of the economic and cultural conditions that enabled adaptation to emerge as a ubiquitous creative and commercial mode. This chapter sets aside Szwydky’s moratorium on the single example to focus on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its numerous theatrical offshoots as a case study of an enduring culture-text. Chapter 2 explores how celebrity culture fueled adaptations and vice versa. She describes, for example, how the Byronic hero emerged as a (seemingly evergreen) character type from the confluence of Byron’s poetry and his personal notoriety, both of which he himself cultivated assiduously and others emulated and adapted. She also examines the ways in which theatrical adaptations were both driven by celebrity culture—with plays written “around” famous actors or to capitalize on previous blockbuster successes—and contributed to the celebrity status of literary authors. Chapter 3 turns from theatrical adaptations to fine art adaptations, considering, for example, how William Blake and Gustave Doré adapted authors such as Milton and Dante, becoming “part of a broader network of adaptations that shaped the reception of their work into the next century” (22). Chapter 4 examines two nineteenth-century “storyworlds”: Dickensian England and Camelot. These storyworlds, Szwydky argues, emerge as amalgams of the numerous interwoven texts, wherein recurring characters (and character types) inhabit a setting that is the sum of its multiple versions. Chapter 5 traces the emergence of “adaptation-driven merchandising” in children’s toy theaters and other “commercial tie-ins” of literary works as well as the proliferation of the Gothic in popular culture. Both merchandise and popular fiction, she argues, “functioned as early forms of participatory culture” (23, 175–76). The conclusion returns to the book’s central argument, that adaptation does not merely extend or revive a literary work but is a primary driver of literary creation. As she argues, “Instead of approaching adaptations as popular forms of canon extension or canon preservation, adaptation should be understood as a central, driving factor of literary production, reception, and canon formation” (211). Overall, the book makes a convincing argument for viewing transmedia adaptation as a ubiquitous practice with much more cultural impact and a much longer history than scholars are, perhaps, wont to acknowledge.The “big picture” view in Transmedia Adaptation is certainly helpful in establishing the omnipresence and vast cultural impact of these adaptational practices, but more close attention to specific examples would not have undermined that methodological approach and would help the reader see not just what was happening in the nineteenth-century convergence culture, to borrow Henry Jenkins’s term, but how and to what ends. In other words, that there were countless adaptations of texts happening at all times, in numerous formats, penetrating multiple social strata is itself noteworthy, but more attention to illustrative examples exploring specific outcomes of this cultural production would offer the reader purchase in the book’s argument. If different agents within the nineteenth-century cultural ecosystem helped to create the Frankenstein culture-text or the perennially popular Byronic hero, say, how did the individual renditions participate in and contribute to the phenomenon?Indeed, some of the moments in the book that are most successful occur when Szwydky offers a deeper dive. For example, in the Frankenstein chapter, she introduces the reader to a dizzying array of dramatic spinoffs from the original novel, from melodramas to farces, that not only anticipate twentieth-century film interpretations but give us our most recognizably Frankenstein-y tropes (the green, inarticulate monster, the sinister lab assistant, the laboratory scene of creation, etc.). That she is right in calling Frankenstein a culture-text is clear from the sheer number and variety of spinoffs she cites, but her argument (you should pardon the pun) really comes alive when she discusses an example of very funny, self-referential dialogue from the parodic Another Piece of Presumption, which was written by Richard Brinsley Peake and followed hard upon his earlier, serious adaptation Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein (both were written and performed at the Adelphi in 1823).In the latter, parodic version, the character of the playwright, “Dramaticus Devildum,” and Adelphi’s actual stage manager, Mr. Lee (played by himself), discuss their “behind the scenes” strategies for boosting sales and difficulties with staging their production. If they underscore the “immorality” of the original novel, Devildum explains, they will drive up ticket sales, demonstrating his adherence to the adage that any publicity is good publicity. However, when Devildum plans to feature the exciting spectacle of a house on fire, with an actual fire, Lee objects, “No sir—the County Fire Office won’t stand it—that is doubly hazardous!” And Devildum objects, “Cut out my house on Fire—you’ve cut out the principle Engine in my piece—it is a burning shame—it would have drawn all the sparks in Town” (51). Szwydky’s discussion of the delightful self-parody in this 1823 production allows her to draw a convincing through line from the very first adaptations of the Frankenstein story to twentieth-century comic riffs, such as Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). Fans of Brooks’s absurdist humor may be interested to learn that he was far from the first to introduce silly song and dance routines with his monster’s performance of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” The early nineteenth-century adaptations featured singing and dancing monsters as well (52).There are missed opportunities, however, in other chapters where Szwydky does not give the same attention to specific examples. Chapter 3 in particular relies heavily on other scholars’ work, with less attention to primary materials. In part this reflects the challenge for scholars of ephemera. As Szwydky explains, many of the paintings in the literary galleries of the turn of the nineteenth century, which she discusses in this chapter, are missing or destroyed now. (Other kinds of material culture—playbills, scripts, costumes, toys, memorabilia—may or may not be collected and cataloged as systematically as literary texts, if they are still in existence at all.) Still, as she notes, while the paintings of the literary galleries are gone, the souvenir illustrated books that accompanied the exhibitions do still exist. We could say something about how the literary galleries envisioned particular scenes from Shakespeare or Milton, for instance, based on the engravings in the books. Indeed, Szwydky includes an image from one such engraving, of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Enchanted Island before the Cell of Prospero, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (112), but she offers relatively little explication of that interesting image. She points out that these early visual adaptations influenced subsequent stage performances and, one imagines, as with the Frankenstein example, later film adaptations as well, so one would have liked a little more discussion of how the images mediate between the original play and the subsequent interpretations.Transmedia Adaptation is an ambitious book, so it faces challenges that a smaller argument about a narrower topic might not, and the author deserves credit for undertaking such an expansive project, I think. Interdisciplinary scholarship is highly valued in literary studies, but the fact remains that few of us are trained equally in multiple fields, and the depth of knowledge, training, and experience required for any one discipline—let alone several—is immense. A literary scholar of Romanticism may be forgiven for not having intensive training in late-Victorian art history, say. Nevertheless, one cannot help but see some gaps in the book. The comprehensive treatment of Frankenstein and its adaptations stands in contrast to the rather sweeping claims about and comparatively superficial discussion of the pre-Raphaelites’ paintings of Keats’s poetry, for example. Where the reliance on other scholars is perhaps too heavy in some places (as in the discussion of the literary galleries and Blake’s multimedia work), a more thorough engagement with the critical conversation about the visual turn in Victorian culture broadly, and about the Pre-Raphaelites’ transmedial practices more specifically, would have been helpful later in chapter 3. And it would, perhaps, have forestalled a tendency to forward “straw person” claims such as when Szwydky remarks that “literary scholars typically approach illustration as secondary to texts” (115). Much work has been done in Victorian studies in the past several decades to explore the complex relationships between image and text, and there are very few scholars of Victorian literary and visual culture, one imagines, who would recognize themselves in her characterization of this “typical” approach. However, if scholars in the various disciplines that Transmedia Adaptation engages might identify lacunae here and there, they will also find much that is thought-provoking and fruitful. Far from dampening the reader’s interest, the gaps invite further research, exploration, and conversation across disciplinary lines.