Myth as Adaptation: Rethinking Mythic Novelizations

Despite myth’s ubiquity as a concept, a body of cultural and material artifacts, and an artistic wellspring for creativity, a common refrain about myth is its definitional slipperiness. However, given Greek myth’s inherent lack of an “Ur-version” (Foster 4)—meaning that every “teller of a myth is always both a reteller and an innovator” (Martin 16)—myth might best be understood as an ever-expanding accumulation of adaptive processes and adapted products. The many novelizations of Greek myth that characterize our current “golden age of retelling” (Northington and Williams xiii) perpetuate myth’s adaptive nature but, like their classical variants, have yet to be adequately studied as adaptations. My paper addresses this critical lacuna, exploring these novelizations of Greek myth through the lens of adaptation studies. Contra Bentley’s impulse to gather these texts together in a “new category of contemporary fiction” (264) that he calls the neo-mythological novel, I argue—focusing on novels by Barry Unsworth, Colm Tóibín, Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes—that an adaptation studies frame more effectively reveals both the taxonomic and ideological heterogeneity of Greek myth novelizations and the particular contours of their “derivative originality” (Jellenik 184).