An Age of Adaptations: The Eighteenth Century

This essay contends that adaptation was not merely a marginal or secondary practice in the eighteenth century, but rather a fundamental cultural logic shaping literature, criticism, print culture, and material objects. Drawing on contemporary adaptation theory, it demonstrates that debates surrounding fidelity, originality, and transformation were already prevalent during this period, when methods such as translation, imitation, rewriting, abridgement, serialisation, and transmedial reworking were widely recognised as legitimate forms of creativity. The essay situates eighteenth-century adaptation within a broad historical context, encompassing Shakespearean rewritings, Sterneana, lexicography, periodical culture, and colonial textiles, emphasising that texts and forms circulated through continuous processes of reuse and reinterpretation. Furthermore, it introduces five contributions to the journal’s monograph section, which explore adaptation as a form of epistemic critique, a means of readerly education, practices of lexical compilation, serial print production, and the material domestication of ideology. Ultimately, this essay presents the eighteenth century as an "age of adaptations," in which cultural vitality was reliant on transformation, hybridity, and the productive instability of texts.