Romantic Adaptations

Essays in Mediation and Remediation

Cian Duffy, Peter Howell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472414106
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317061656
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did romanticism define its relationship with its sources? How has romanticism since been understood and misunderstood across a range of cultural activities? These are among the questions taken up in this reexamination of the place of adaptation within romanticism. Renegotiating the cultural topography of the period and the place of romanticism in subsequent cultural history, the volume focuses on the adaptation of source material by romantic writers and the adaptation in subsequent periods of the tropes and ideologies associated with romanticism. In place of a hierarchical distinction between source and text, between 'romanticism' and its contexts, the collection identifies distinct but overlapping and mutually constitutive genres such as the Gothic and romance. Whether their essays deal with early nineteenth-century periodical reviews, affordable editions of Pride and Prejudice aimed at the late nineteenth-century mass audience, or the ongoing cultural presence of romanticism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about embryology and stem cell research, the contributors remain cognizant of the tension between the processes of adaptation and the apparent ideology of romantic originality.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Contributors
• Introduction: Adaptation, Mediation and Remediation
• 1 ‘Reason in China is not Reason in England’: Eighteenth-century Adaptations of China by Horace Walpole and Arthur Murphy
• 2 Through a Glass Darkly: Gothic Adaptation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
• 3 Adapting Rights: Thomas Taylor’s A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
• 4 Adapting to Dissect: Rhetoric and Representation in the Quarterly Reviews in the Romantic Period
• 5 The Miniature Sublime: Later Fortunes of the Cockney Aesthetic
• 6 The Beauties of Byron and Shelley
• 7 ‘In perfect volume form, Price Sixpence’: Illustrating Pride and Prejudice for a Late-Victorian Mass-Market
• 8 The Imprisonment of Foucault: Remediating a Twentieth-Century ‘Romantic Intellectual’
• 9 The Monstrous Hybrid as Object of Scientific Experiment
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index