The eighteenth century was a golden age of adaptation: classical epics were adapted to contemporaneous mock-epics, life-writing to novels, novels to plays, and unauthorized sequels abounded. In our own time, cultural products of the long eighteenth century continue to be widely adapted. Early novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, the founding documents of the United States, Jane Austen's novels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein-all of these have been adapted so often that they are ubiquitous cultural mythoi, even for people who have never read them. Eighteenth-century texts appear in consumer products, comics, cult mashups, fan fiction, films, network and streaming shows, novels, theater stagings, and web serials. Adapting the Eighteenth Century provides innovative, hands-on pedagogies for teaching eighteenth-century studies and adaptation across disciplines and levels. Among the works treated in or as adaptations are novels by Austen, Defoe, and Shelley, as well as the current worldwide musical sensation Hamilton. Essays offer tested models for the teaching of practices such as close reading, collaboration, public scholarship, and research; in addition, they provide a historical grounding for discussions of such issues as the foundations of democracy, critical race and gender studies, and notions of genre. The collection as a whole demonstrates the fruitfulness of teaching about adaptation in both period-specific and generalist courses across the curriculum. SHARON HARROW is Professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. KIRSTEN T. SAXTON is Professor of English at Mills College.

This collection of essays offers insights into the ways in which eighteenth-century novels have been adapted and appropriated by later writers. It will be of interest to students of the rise of the novel, interdisciplinary approaches to literature, and the developing field of adaptation studies.

Nine authors from prominent universities around the world show how the adventurous thinkers, artists, and adventurers of the eighteenth-century period placed adaptation at the center of the quest for a modern civilization. The book will appeal to cultural historians, historians of science, and those interested in literary metamorphoses.

This book presents a scholarly edition of five of the first adaptations of Shakespeare from the eighteenth century, the period when Shakespeare became “Shakespeare.” Written by men influential in early Augustan cultural spheres, these adaptations demonstrate how contemporary literary principles and contemporary politics were applied to Shakespeare’s texts. In these adaptations of Henry V, Richard II, Coriolanus, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, we see the various ways that eighteenth-century authors “righted” Shakespeare’s “wrongs”: through the addition and alteration of female characters and romantic sub-plots, the introduction of new scenes, the use of the unities of time and place, and the inclusion of overt moral and political arguments. The critical introduction contextualizes the five adaptations through its discussion of early eighteenth-century theatre and politics. First providing an overview of the state of the theatre at the beginning of the Augustan age, the introduction then examines the multiple political conspiracies that rocked the first years of George I’s reign and that provide the backdrop to these adaptations. Furthermore, the introduction draws particular attention to the importance of the actress in the early eighteenth century, highlighting how Shakespeare’s adaptors drew on actresses’ cultural capital to alter Shakespeare’s texts. Finally, the edition provides a critical introduction to each of the plays. Extensive explanatory notes are provided, which situate further these plays in their contemporary context. In its introduction and explanatory notes, Shakespeare Adaptations supplies an important critical apparatus to five plays which are often noted in the annals of Shakespearean theatrical history with derision. However, this edition reveals how these plays documented their own time and helped shape Shakespeare into the most recognizable literary icon in the Western canon.

Explores the adaptation and appropriation of a range of canonical and lesser-known British and Irish novels of the eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen offers an extensive introduction to cinematic representations of the eighteenth century, mostly derived from classic fiction of that period, and sheds light on the process of making prose fiction into film. The contributors provide a variety of theoretical and critical approaches to the process of bringing literary works to the screen. They consider a broad range of film and television adaptations, including several versions of Robinson Crusoe; three films of Moll Flanders; American, British, and French television adaptations of Gulliver's Travels, Clarissa, Tom Jones, and Jacques le fataliste; Wim Wender's film version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice Years; the controversial film of Diderot's La Religieuese; and French and Anglo-American motion pictures based on Les Liaisons dangereuses among others. This book will appeal to students and scholars of literature and film alike.

Adapting the Canon brings together some of the most recent and exciting research in the growing field of adaptation studies, charting the passage of canonical texts across time, cultures and different media. Spanning several Humanities disciplines, the essays in this volume explore key questions about what adaptation means for the canonical work, focusing on texts adapted to and from English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian, from the medieval world to the twenty-first century. Adaptation is much more than the process by which great novels become films. In this rich selection of case studies, canonical figures such as Shakespeare, Voltaire, Kafka, Pound, Villon, Tasso, Calvino, Hugo, Valéry, Zola, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen are reimagined in a range of media which has never been so broad as today, from theatre, radio and television to the smartphone.

This book brings film adaptation of literature to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior “master race” to “uplift” its colonized populations—morally, socially, and economically. This book argues that, on the one hand, film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels reveal the arrogance and coercive intentions that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity—improvement’s post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the book also argues that the films use their nineteenth-century source texts to criticize these same legacies of imperialism. By bringing together film adaptation, postcolonial theory, and literary studies, the book demonstrates that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a way to engage with the baggage of ideological heritage in our contemporary global media environment.

"Asking why adaptation has been seen as more problematic to theorize than other humanities subjects, and why it has been more theoretically problematic in the humanities than it has been in the sciences and social sciences, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to both explicate and redress "the problem of theorizing adaptation" through a metacritical history of theorizing adaptation from the late seventeenth century to the present, a metatheoretical theory of the relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities, and analysis of the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation. The history finds that adaptation was not always the bad theoretical object that it increasingly became from the late eighteenth century: in earlier centuries, adaptation was celebrated and valued as a means of aesthetic and cultural progress. Tracing the falling fortunes of adaptation under theorization, the history reveals that there have always been dissenting voices valorizing adaptation. Adaptation studies can learn from history not only how to theorize adaptation more positively, but also to consider "the problem of theorization" for adaptation. Metatheoretical analysis of what theorization and adaptation are and how they function in the humanities finds that they are rival, overlapping, inimical processes, each seeking to remake culture -- and each other -- in their images. It is not simply the case that adaptation has to adapt to theorization: rather, theorization needs to adapt to and through adaptation. The final section attends to the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation, analyzing how tiny pieces of rhetoric have constructed adaptation's relationship to theorization, and turning to figurative rhetoric, or figuration, as a third process that has can mediate between adaptation and theorization and refigure their relationship. Moreover, particular rhetorical figures can redress particular problems in adaptation studies and open new ways to theorize adaptation studies"--