Adaptation study reached a new high in the mid-2000s with Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptations. She generates categories of adaptation to organise the scores of examples she discusses, but her book fails to develop a theory to underpin the study.

She finds hints of one in metaphors of ‘transcoding’, in Katherine Hayles’s use of the ‘rhizome’ model and in John Bryant’s idea of ‘reception-generated changes’. Only Bryant offers a viable lead, allowing her to propose a reception ‘continuum’. That is not enough.

Chapter 9 argues, rather, that adaptation depends upon the concept of the work. An adaptation becomes part of the original work’s after-life, just as the original work may be considered part of the adaptation’s prehistory. The adaptation establishes a new production–reception continuum or slider of its own, which either stops there because the new work is ignored or itself endows a newer adaptation. The latter takes on its own textual and cultural trajectory while remaining substantively linked to the first by virtue of its transformation of at least some subject matter.

Adaptations of the Ned Kelly bushranger story in folklore, stage, novel and screen serve as a test case.