Gothic Imagination has obviously been a labor of love for him, as hehas brought together the fruits of nearly 30 years of travelinginside and outside the United States, visiting his subjects’ homesas well as attending various conventions, film premieres, and otherjunkets, and persuading his subjects to talk to him. The book isdedicated to his father James C. Tibbetts, an enthusiast in his ownright, who saw it as his duty to introduce his son to the Gothic“worlds of wonder.”

In the preface, the British author Richard Holmes describesTibbetts’ herculean efforts as “wild and exuberant,” (ix) that will testas well as stimulate the reader’s synapses as well as their literary,cinematic, or televisual prejudices. I can think of no better means tosum up the experience of this book.

Laurence RawBaskent University

From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking theTransition of Popular Narratives and Characters Across Old andNew Media. Costas Constandinides. London: Continuum, 2010.166 pp. $100.00 cloth.

To “rethink” adaptation in film, television, theater, and newmedia has become commonplace in recent critical interventions. Sup-porters of “fidelity” criticism have been assailed from all sides whileconcepts, such as “originality” have become increasingly anachronis-tic in a world where everyone—producers, directors, writers, andaudiences—can be viewed as “authors,” contributing to the meaningof a given text.

So what does From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptationhave to offer, as we try to find new formulations of what“adaptation” might be? Costas Constandinides urges us to thinkbeyond “institutionalized media” such as the printed word, film, andtelevision, and focus instead on new technologies and their increas-ingly media-literate audiences (4). His argument depends on twointerrelated concepts—intertextual dialogism and postcelluloid adap-tation. Intertextual dialogism presupposes that every text comprisesan intersection of textual surfaces: all texts are tissues of quotations,

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conflations, and inversions of other texts. Hence it is futile to lookfor fidelity in adaptation: we should concern ourselves with “the newforms of interaction, narrative, and representation that new mediaintroduce” (17). Postcelluloid adaptation is a process that “does notsimply describe the transition of familiar images from an older med-ium to a new, but a process that is a symptom of the cultural logicof convergence culture” (25). A postcelluloid adaptation not onlyinvolves new media but also encompasses “a multiplicity of textsthat may function independently but at the same time are deliber-ately seen as incomplete in terms of signification and narration”(26).

Constandinides devotes the remainder of his book to a series of casestudies demonstrating these concepts of textual dialogism and postcel-luloid adaptation at work. Steven Spielberg’s version of Philip K.Dick’s Minority Report (2002) raises questions of who controls the nar-rative—the director, producer, or the viewer: the film encourages “aparticipatory process that is difficult to tame and condense within theboundaries of what has been called thus far a theory of film adapta-tion” (54). David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and the adaptation ofIan McEwan’s novel Enduring Love (2004), show how different technol-ogies—digital technology and the handheld camera—raise questionsabout cinema’s ontology that promote “a number of interpretations/readings not only about the films themselves, but also the theoriesthat may be required to construct an adaptation” (72). Film versionsof graphic novels, such as those of Frank Miller, treat the viewer as“an implied video-gamer and an implied consumer,” playing an activerole in the construction of the overall meaning (88). Constandinidesexamines Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong (2005), which con-structs a “database” of information accessible to viewers before andafter the film’s theatrical release, in the form of websites and extrasincluded in the DVD release or online. These strategies place viewersin the position of producers who can identify with the director, pro-duction designer, or other creative personnel while generating newtexts of their own. Jackson’s “huge array of data” (140) allows us toconstruct a cinematic (or online) experience “quite distinct fromwatching a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architecturalsite” (140).

Constandinides’ book is both entertaining and well-argued, dem-onstrating vividly how the shifting media landscape has created new

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positionings for viewers vis-a-vis the texts they consume, either inthe cinema or on DVD or on Netflix. On the other hand, it couldbe said that active participation is not quite as revolutionary as Con-standinides would have us believe. In Hollywood’s “Golden Age” ofthe big studios during the interwar period, the fanzines encouragedviewers to develop their own interpretations of the films theywatched, by organizing look-alike and/or fancy dress competitions,or writing alternative endings that might appear in the letterscolumns. None of these activities would have much significance inthe era of postcelluloid adaptation, but they allowed viewers to con-sume films in different ways, other than watching them at the localpicture-palace. Perhaps those forms of participation using the Inter-net or YouTube represent a modernized version of these activities,promoted by Hollywood studios to generate interest in their prod-ucts. Nevertheless Constandinides’ book is well worth reading as asignificant contribution to the gradually expanding corpus of adapta-tion theory, as well as being a penetrating study into contemporarypopular cinematic cultures.

Laurence RawBaskent University

Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-Century Man inPopular Culture. Eds. Elwood Watson and Marc E. Shaw.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. 252 pp. $24.95 paperback.

Watson and Shaw’s collection of essays on the American mascu-linities of the twenty-first century features an examination of a spe-cialized field made available to all readers of culture. Althoughtheoretically founded, the essays within this text provide a broadrange of inquiry for American popular culture and gender studiesthrough the lens of late capitalist times. The essays included aretopical, socially aware and mark not only the ways masculinity isdiscussed but also the potential for future discussion.

As a cohesive unit, the first section “Masculinities and the Mar-ket: Late Capitalism and Corporate Influence on Gender Processes”navigates theoretically complex perspectives for just over a hun-dred pages. The economic negotiations of masculinity are apparent

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