The Cannes festival is, famously, the keeper of the flame of the auteur tradition. The ritual of honouring the overarching vision of a single writer-director is entrenched in its history – from Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni to Jane Campion and Andrea Arnold. Since the turn of the millennium, only two winners of the Palme d'Or have been literary adaptations: Roman Polanski's The Pianist, and Laurent Cantet's The Class. Of the remaining films, only one – Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley – was not written by its director.

This year, however, things are different: it is a bookworm's Cannes, with directors as likely to have had their noses buried in novels as dreaming up original ideas.

All eyes are on Walter Salles's adaptation of Jack Kerouac's modern classic On the Road, which premieres on Wednesday. Meanwhile, David Cronenberg's version of Cosmopolis – Don DeLillo's 2003 novel of gleaming surfaces, set in a billionaire's limo – is also one of the festival's eagerly anticipated films.

There are other literary adaptations, too. Paperboy is Lee Daniels's take on Pete Dexter's richly atmospheric novel set in the deep south about two journalists attempting to uncover the truth behind a murder conviction, starring Nicole Kidman. John Hillcoat's Lawless is a western based on a novel by Matt Bondurant, adapted by Nick Cave and starring Shia LaBeouf. Finally, Jacques Audiard, whose previous films include Cannes hit A Prophet, has brought to the screen Rust and Bone, based on the tough-guy short-story collection by Craig Davidson.

Is, then, the auteur tradition fading? And does it matter? Nick James, the editor of the cinephile magazine Sight and Sound, is convinced it does. Cannes, he says, performs a crucial role against the ever-rising tide of literary adaptation – which he deems "a lesser form of cinema" than the single-vision auteur tradition.

The taste for literary material is, he says, frequently a baldly commercial, rather than artistic, choice. "There is no question that for a long time now Hollywood and a large part of the British film industry have become dependent on literary material. It makes the film less of a gamble if a certain number of people already know the material works."

But, he said, the old rule held good: great novels do not great movies make. The exceptions, he said, are figures such as Polanski, capable of transcending his literary sources, or the Coen brothers, who bound from adaptations (such as No Country for Old Men) to their own material (such as A Serious Man) with unpredictable energy.

For his first cinematic outing, Rufus Norris, associate director at the National Theatre, has chosen a literary adaptation; a reworking of Daniel Clay's novel Broken, opened the Cannes Critics' Week sidebar. For Norris, there was never any doubt he would direct an existing text – writing is "a craft I don't have and don't imagine ever having", he said. "The tradition of the auteur is a great Cannes tradition. In Europe the director is seen as all-powerful in a way that he or she is not in Britain."

It is a matter of cultural difference: "The fact is, we had this guy called Shakespeare, and he was quite good. The power of the writer in British culture goes very deep." Norris is a veteran of adaptations: his first hit was Festen, a stage version of Thomas Vinterberg's film of the same name, which itself premiered in Cannes in 1998.

Leslie Felperin, a critic for Variety, is relaxed about the creeping domination of adaptations. She said: "The greatest directors can completely transform their source material and filter it through their own consciousnesses, creating something entirely new. Some directors need source material almost to kick against." She pointed to Darezhan Omirbaev's Kazakh reworking of Crime and Punishment, part of this year's Un Certain Regard lineup at Cannes. "It's a conversation between the director and Dostoevsky. In a strange way very faithful to the text … I certainly don't agree that literary adaptations are a lesser form of cinema."

Audiard's Rust and Bone also brought to bear a fresh vision on its source material: Davidson's original stories were unravelled and restitched by Audiard and his co-writer, who took characters from separate stories and brought them together in a romance "to add light and sun" to the "harsh, solitary" lives of Davidson's original. "We weren't faithful to the letter, but we were faithful in terms of colour, mood, atmosphere," said Audiard.

Whatever happens over the next few exciting and uncertain days, one thing is certain: there is a strong chance the coveted Palme will go to a film-of-the-book.