Romantic Adaptations Essays in Mediation and Remediation

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.

Introduction, Cian Duffy, Peter Howell, Caroline Ruddell; Chapter 1 ‘Reason in China is not Reason in England’, Peter Kitson; Chapter 2 Through a Glass Darkly, Joseph Crawford; Chapter 3 Adapting Rights, James Vigus; Chapter 4 Adapting to Dissect, Matthew Sangster; Chapter 5 The Miniature Sublime, Michael Bradshaw; Chapter 6 The Beauties of Byron and Shelley, Daniel Cook; Chapter 7 ‘In perfect volume form, Price Sixpence’, Annika Bautz; Chapter 8 The Imprisonment of Foucault, Peter Howell; Chapter 9 The Monstrous Hybrid as Object of Scientific Experiment, Allyson Purcell-Davis;

Cian Duffy is Reader in English Literature, Peter Howell is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Caroline Ruddell is Senior Lecturer in Film and Popular Culture at St. Mary's University College, UK.