Reimagining Literature: A Comparative Analysis of Novels and Graphic Novels

This dissertation lies at the intersection of literary analysis, adaptation studies, and comics studies, a field that has seen significant expansion in academia in recent years. Following an initial section dedicated to establishing a theoretical and methodological framework, primarily concerning the semiotics and narratology of graphic narratives, as well as the theoretical foundations of adaptation theory, the core of this research consists of applying these tools to a comparative analysis of selected 19th-century Anglophone novels and their comic book adaptations. These works include Ivanhoe(1819), Oliver Twist (1838), and Dracula (1897). For each text, the study offers a brief examination of a specific aspect of the novel before focusing on the adaptive process, which must account for various extratextual factors such as the context of publication and, most importantly, the cultural heritage derived from previous visual adaptations. Consequently, this study aims to demonstrate how comics, as a hybrid medium that blends words and images, necessarily engage in a dialogue not only with the source text but also with the preceding works that have significantly shaped the collective imagination surrounding the hereby analysed novels.