| dc.description.abstract | Book covers are the gateway to any literary text, whether it being a plain sheet of paper or a colourful cover filled with illustrations of various elements. They can be boring, decorative, beautiful, old, or covered in dust. But no matter the condition, they are all designed to portray meaning. Meaning in terms of the literary work’s, content, theme, plot, setting, characters and relationship to other texts.
Adaptations have been a part of the literary field for as long as people have been telling stories, whether these be told verbally or through written text. Adaptations are special - special in terms of their nature of being a combination of two identities. It is its own work, but at the same time made up of or bringing forward different aspects of a different literary work. This is the main focus of the text that follows, and which will be explored in detail by looking at the process of creating a cover, the strategic decision each publisher has to make, and the various elements which make up a book cover. These will be presented through carefully chosen theory related to book cover elements, multimodality and intersemiotic translation. This will lay the basis for a visual rhetoric analysis, which will be conducted by looking at the modern covers of three classics; J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. These classics will represent leisure reading, writing intended for women and a literary work often used in western schools respectfully. There will be presented comparisons using a collection of covers from identified adaptations of these classics, specifically in the forms of young adult novels and graphic novels. The main objectives will be to (1) determine what elements each cover and groups of covers consists of, their function and overall appeal to the intended target audience; (2) decipher in what ways and to what extent the adaptations can be identified as just that, an adaptation, based on the elements utilised on the cover. This analysis will at the same time create a small collection of various young adult novels and graphic novels based on the classics mentioned in this abstract. | |