The Origins of Transmedia Storytelling in Early Twentieth Century Adaptation

This book explores the significance of professional writers and their role in developing British storytelling in the 1920s and 1930s, and their influence on the poetics of today’s transmedia storytelling. Modern techniques can be traced back to the early twentieth century when film, radio and television provided professional writers with new formats and revenue streams for their fiction. The book explores the contribution of four British authors, household names in their day, who adapted work for film, television and radio. Although celebrities between the wars, Clemence Dane, G.B. Stern, Hugh Walpole and A.E.W Mason have fallen from view. The popular playwright Dane, witty novelist Stern and raconteur Walpole have been marginalised for being German, Jewish, female or gay and Mason’s contribution to film has been overlooked also. It argues that these and other vocational authors should be reassessed for their contribution to new media forms of storytelling. The book makes a significant contribution in the fields of media studies, adaptation studies, and the literary middlebrow.

Alexis Weedon is a Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, and holds the UNESCO Chair in New Media Forms of the Book. She is author of Victorian Publishing: The Economics of the Book for the Mass Market 1830-1916 (2016), and co-author of Elinor Glyn: Novelist, Businesswoman and Glamour Icon (2014). She also co-edited the new media journal Convergence, as well as several books, including Fiction and The Woman Question 1860-1930 (2020), Developing a Sense of Place (2020), and Retelling Cinderella: Cultural and Creative Transformations (2020).