Intermediality and transmediality in Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck. Theatre, opera and cinema adaptations

The purpose of this research is to study the work of Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian authors who brought symbolism, initially poetic, to novel and theatre, as well as to experimentation with other arts, from an inter-artistic, intermedial and transmedial perspective, for which purpose their theatrical, operatic and cinematographic rewritings will also be studied. The justification and interest of the research is based on the relevance of a study of these characteristics, non-existent to date, for the discipline of Comparative Literature and Interartistic, Intermedial and Transmedial Studies. This study therefore aims to respond and contribute to the investigation of a creative period of great interest in the exploration of relations between the arts, years of symbolism and the resulting 'fraternité des arts', in order to study two pioneering cases: the work of Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck. Both authors took the symbolist movement to (trans)generic experimentation, offering an abundance of inter-artistic relationships in their works that are continued in their later adaptations. The corpus aims to collect the works of both authors that present rewritings in other media with the intention of systematising these intermedial and inter-artistic relations in the authors' original works and also in their rewritings. However, once this systematisation has been carried out, the more detailed study of the processes of intermediality and transmediality will focus on three works: Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte (1892), Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) and Maeterlinck’s L'oiseau bleu (1909), which coincides with Bruges-la-Morte in being the works that brought the author worldwide fame and also being the most widely adapted to various artistic media.