Adapting the Eighteenth Century
Adapting the Eighteenth Century

Author: Maria Park Bobroff

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781580469838

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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.

Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century
Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century

Author: Kristine Johanson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-12-11

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1611474604

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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.

Adapting the Canon
Adapting the Canon

Author: Silke Arnold-De Simine

Publisher: Legenda

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9781781887080

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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.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen
Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen

Author: Robert Mayer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-09-26

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780521529105

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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 King Lear for the Stage
Adapting King Lear for the Stage

Author: Lynne Bradley

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9781409405979

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Exploring whether the impulse to adapt Shakespeare has changed over time, Bradley argues for restoring a sense of historicity to the study of adaptation. Bradley compares adaptations of King Lear from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries to twentieth-century rewritings of the play, suggesting modern Shakespeare adaptations represent a unique genre that permits playwrights to acknowledge their literary heritage while articulating more modern subject positions and participating in broader debates about art and society.

Theorizing Adaptation
Theorizing Adaptation

Author: Kamilla Elliott

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0197511171

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"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"--

Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel
Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel

Author: Vivian Y. Kao

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 3030545806

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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.

The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe'
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe'

Author: John Richetti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1108609287

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An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

Shakespeare’s Fans
Shakespeare’s Fans

Author: Johnathan H. Pope

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 303033726X

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This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeare’s place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans’ practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeare’s Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works.

Representing the Eighteenth Century in Film and Television, 2000–2015
Representing the Eighteenth Century in Film and Television, 2000–2015

Author: Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-06

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 3319562673

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This book analyzes early twenty-first century film and television’s fascination with representing the Anglo-American eighteenth century. Grounded in cultural studies, film studies, and adaptation theory, the book examines how these works represented the eighteenth century to assuage anxieties about values, systems, and institutions at the start of a new millennium. The first two chapters reveal how films like Gulliver’s Travels (2010) or the remake of Poldark (2015) use history to establish the direct relationship between the eighteenth century and the twenty-first. The final chapters examine pairs of productions for how they address and legitimate different aspects of contemporary ideology such as attitudes toward race and gender, or the connection between technological and social progress.