The starting point for Lisette Lopez Szwydky's Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century is the large number of canonical novelists and authors of the long nineteenth century. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Szwydky persuasively makes the argument that the literary canon has been formed by adaptation across media rather than adaptation resulting from canonical status. In discussing these works, Szwydky identifies patterns of adaptation that work across print and visual cultures, both drawing on scholarship from theater and performance, visual culture, art history, and literary and fan studies, and looking at re-mediations that range from oil paintings to toy theaters. By taking a wide view of adaptation, Szwydky succeeds in her aim to destabilize stories of exceptionalism that have emerged by focusing on individual literary figures while viewing elite and popular culture as interrelated. This macro-view of nineteenth-century adaptation enables her to consider adaptation as integral to any creative process. In doing so, she reframes authors and adapters as both consumers and creators—their adaptation to industrial and legislative processes (such as theatrical censorship) playing a vital role in the development of modes of representation, and their consumption of media key to the evolution of literary genres and aesthetics, such as the gothic and today's interest in the neo-Victorian.

Yet, despite this wide lens and reference to multiple works, there is one composite figure that reoccurs throughout the book that deserves mention here because it illustrates Szwydky's central point most strongly. The fact we remember Frankenstein/Frankenstein at all is because of frequent adaptation; we remember canonical texts and their characters through and with their adaptations. Early stage adaptations’ colored make-up is the reason we often visualize Frankenstein's monster's skin as blue-green (54). Cultural memory of a text is built through interventions made by the various creative practitioners who have worked on adaptations, their deviations making them co-creators. Szwydky develops this concept of a “culture-text,” building on Paul Davis's and Brian Rose's usage, to consider how the idea, impression, or imaginary world of a canonical work or author is “built through a vast network of adaptations over time . . . [that] belongs to everyone (creators and consumers alike)” (18). It is not just the fact that these creative interventions into a culture-text influence how we think about the work now, but also that adaptations widened the audience of such texts. So, for example, Szwydky demonstrates that most nineteenth-century consumers understood Mary Shelley's Frankenstein/Frankenstein through theatrical adaptation because initial print runs were eclipsed by just one full theatrical house (216–17). This process of adaptation played an important role in the democratization of literary knowledge in the nineteenth century and in reception and later canon formation.

At the heart of Szwydky's argument is the contention that nineteenth-century audiences were not that different from us, their twenty-first century counterparts. The nineteenth century saw technological innovations quickly turned to commercial profit, leading to an increased diversity of media available for consumption Most significantly, advancements in printing technology and the lower cost of production led to an increase in illustrated engravings, further fusing word with image. The carefully curated frontispiece facilitated novelists’ celebrity through the association of their image with the work consumed, and toy theater publishers cross-sold wares to young consumers by printing their business names on toy theater shopfronts. Comparing navigation of new media in the early twenty-first century with the nineteenth century's media proliferation is also what leads Szwydky's productive engagement with fan fiction studies. In particular, Henry Jenkins's “convergence culture” (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide [2006]) provides a means for her to emphasize the sophistication required to intertextually and intermedially navigate a culture-text—a concept that is further broadened using the notion of a “storyworld” as anything from a single “text,” to an author's output, or an entire genre such as the gothic or the medieval. (My own discipline of theater studies could benefit from more frequently incorporating insights from fields such as fan fiction and audience studies).

However, this also leads me to my main criticism of Szwydky's work. In rightly stating that those interested in transmedia storytelling need to consider it as having a long history, Szwydky applies fan fiction terms a little too neatly and opens herself up to the criticism about power structures frequently leveled against Jenkins's early work. Today's new technologies create different opportunities for “co-creation” that rely on significantly different power relations. Yes, we do need to see nineteenth-century consumers as more actively involved in creating meaning through the various active ways in which they engaged their imaginations when playing with optical toys or making meaning by reading or watching, but when Szwydky asks what separates those who gathered to tell ghost stories at Villa Diodati from fans meeting to develop their own fan fiction (206), I found myself answering: a lot. The Shelleys had the cultural capital to publish stories in print from their evening's entertainment in a manner that is very different from today's internet self-publishing.

Yet, the points where I disagreed with Szwydky demonstrate the strength of her book because it prompted me to ask wider questions of the trajectory of transmedia storytelling: Has it become more democratized or less since the nineteenth century? How do differing modes and means of publishing and professionalism in different eras alter reception, particular in relation to the sensations of immediacy and belonging? And, in light of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement that occurred around the time of the book's publication, Szwydky's words in her last few paragraphs about the potential “to diversify both the canon and how we think about canonicity” through adaptation (221) invited me to question how our choices about adaptation can politically intervene in canon formation or make progressive interventions into established canonical culture-texts.