Eat, Pray, Love Expanding Adaptations and Global Tourism

Imitation and adaptation have been around for a very long time indeed – arguably at least since Aristotle’s discussion of mimesis as the backbone of poïesis in ‘The Poetics’. Having been taken more or less for granted as a kind of base condition for many forms of representational art since Aristotle, imitation as adaptation developed for centuries without much comment. Indeed, as Linda Hutcheon explains, “[t]he Victorians were great adapters of just about everything-and in just about every possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, and tableaux vivants were constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again,” without anyone feeling the need to develop a specialized theory of adaptation (Hutcheon 2006: xi). Similarly, Cohen opens his work on the adaptation of ction into lm by remarking that “[t]he twentieth century began in a urry of artistic hybrids, everything from calligrams to tone poems,” and while that century “put more rigorously into practice than ever before certain theories concerning the interrelatedness of the arts”, there persisted, according to Cohen in his ‘Film and Fiction’, a “dearth of discussion”, on how novels have been adapted for the cinema (Cohen 1979: 1, 2).