From Page to Screen: The Enola Holmes Franchise as a Generational Bridge in the Netflix Era

Abstract

Literature has always evolved with its audience, and the twenty-first century is no different. In an era dominated by digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and visual culture, Generation Z occupies a media environment that demands stories to travel beyond the page. This article argues that film adaptation is not a threat to literature but a generational bridge that redirects rather than replaces the reading habit. This article examines how Nancy Springer's young adult novel series transformed into a successful Netflix series. If it's not for the adapted series, the audience might miss the enriching story of Enola Holmes. From Linda Hutcheon's theory of adaptation, Henry Jenkins' concept of transmedia storytelling, and Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding, we can understand how these theories help us analyse the film adaptations within a broader cultural and theoretical framework. Adaptive narration is convenient for expressing emotions and tone through cinematic tools such as colour grading; a fourth wall break and visual narration make the characters more connected to the audience. To support this argument, studies from Library Waves and the Journal of English Cultural Studies found that Gen Z do not reject stories and literature, but instead they are redirected in their consumption. Through adaptation Enola Homes brings nineteenth-century culture alive and presents it with twenty-first-century techniques of storytelling. Literature is willing to meet its audience through the language they speak. Adaptation is not the end of literature; it is literature expanding.