Since the general entertainment model pioneered during the classic studio failed to continue to attract audiences sufficient to sustain the industry, niche production was the answer. Literary sources, screened in a fashion that emphasized their literariness, constituted one (if not the only) successful response of the industry to these changed conditions. Internationally-acclaimed scholar Barton Palmer illuminates the role played by adaptation in furthering a number of related cycles or more diffuse trends that were of central importance to the national cinemas in each case. During the 1960s, the 'Angry Young Men' movement in literature inspired its cinematic other in the British New Wave, while small-budget productions with adult subjects, as well as films modeled closely on the international art cinema.

Adaptation and Literary Cinema is not on the adaptations themselves, but rather on the ways in which adaptation during this culturally turbulent era served two different but connected cinemas.Offering insights into the complex production histories of more than 40 key, if often underappreciated, texts through the discussion of relevant archival materials that identify the shaping pressures in each project. These films include Night of the Iguana, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Toys in the Attic, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Nothing but a Man, Mickey, The Hustler, Up the Down Staircase, Life at the Top, Darling, Morgan!, All Fall Down, The Collector, The Hill, The Magus, The Loved One, The Fox, The Sterile Cuckoo, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Ipcress File, Lord Jim, and King Rat.