ABSTRACT
There are specific historical reasons why it should be dialogism, rather than some other methodology which might make a similar criticism of fidelity analysis, that replaced fidelity as adaptation studies' new orthodoxy at around the turn of this century. The reasons why it would be dialogism that critiqued and usurped fidelity analysis are located within the intellectual histories of the field's intersecting parental disciplines: film studies and literary studies. Film studies, from its outset in the early twentieth century, defensively strove to define its subject matter as legitimately artistic in relation to the older, more established arts. A potentially regressive, conservative text could thereby by reclaimed by audiences in a progressive sense, without needing the intervention of the poststructuralist vanguard critic to facilitate that reclamation. Dialogism could think of texts as replacing the radical function that theory had until then claimed only for itself.
