Adaptation and Nostalgia

This essay highlights the shared critical terrain of adaptation and nostalgia: how they critically juxtapose the past with the present, and how they underscore the impossibility of return while also relying on prior experience. It also explores nostalgia’s effect on personal responses to adaptations and its interaction with textual form. Drawing from various areas of literary, media, and performance studies, including film adaptations of children’s literature, Watchmen and its screen adaptations, and Disney’s live-action remakes, this essay underscores how both nostalgia and adaptation are inherently multivalent concepts, and how they each rely on perspective to generate critical meaning.