A collection of pedagogical essays that presents proven strategies for the teaching of adaptation and eighteenth-century texts 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.

New in paperback! Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory. Scent is also both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material cultural. While other intangibles of the human experience have been examined in the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so far remained largely sidelined in favor of the visual, the aural, touch, and taste. Incorporating wide-scale research and focused case studies from among the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction, Friedman examines how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked sensory information might reshape our understanding of these texts. By highlighting scents and their shifting meanings across the period—bodies, tobacco, smelling-bottles, and sulfur—Reading Smell not only provides new insights into canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, but also sheds new light on the history of the British novel as a whole.