Abstract

This paper explores the modalities of book production based on patterns of intertextual circularity and media transfer from cinema, that is, films whose script is adapted and rewritten as a novel, undergoing a novelization process (even if the script that was adapted and turned into a novel-like readable book was itself already originally inspired in a book or text). The history of book publishing is plentiful in examples in which the text published in a book is inspired by a film script or in which a film was based on a previously published book. The textual migration thus uncovered also questions the very meaning of originality and authorship of a book, insofar as that book results from successive processes of media incarnation. Book publishers such as the Portuguese house Romano Torres, with activity between the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th century, are the backdrop for the study and illustration of this ever changing process of textual and media mutation. This presentation seeks to demonstrate the existence of several books capable of raising questions about their status as an object, showing how the intervention in the text can be correlated with avatars that transform it as a product destined to be framed, thought and consumed in many ways, subjecting itself to a cycle of reconfiguration and appropriation.