Audiences often measure the success of film adaptations by how faithfully they adhere to their original source material. However, fidelity criticism tells only part of the story of adaptation. For example, the changes made to literary sources in the course of creating their film treatments are often fascinating in terms of what they reveal about the different processes of genre recognition and gender identification in both media, as well as the social, cultural, and historical contexts governing their production and reception.

In Screening Gender, Framing Genre, Peter...