MLA 2018 Panel: Session 759
Literary Adaptation as Democratic Exchange in the Romantic Period (1790-1840)
01-07. 10:15–11:30 a.m., Sutton Place, Sheraton A special session
1. “Godwin, Wollstonecrat, Robinson, and the Rise of Novelization; or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” Glenn Jellenik, U of Central Arkansas
2. “Romantic Adaptations: Minerva’s Shared Circuit of Popular Conventions,” Elizabeth Neiman, U of Maine, Orono
3. “Hack Dramatists, Adaptations, and Cultural Literacy in the Nineteenth Century,” Lissette Lopez Szwydky, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville
1. “Godwin, Wollstonecrat, Robinson, and the Rise of Novelization; or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” Glenn Jellenik, U of Central Arkansas
2. “Romantic Adaptations: Minerva’s Shared Circuit of Popular Conventions,” Elizabeth Neiman, U of Maine, Orono
3. “Hack Dramatists, Adaptations, and Cultural Literacy in the Nineteenth Century,” Lissette Lopez Szwydky, U of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Panel Description
In her essay, “100+ Years of Adaptations, or Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” Deborah Cartmell posits adaptation as a popularization of ideas, albeit one that is often “damned with praise in its ‘democratizing’ effect: it brings literature to the masses but it also brings the masses to literature, diluting, simplifying, and therefore appealing to the many rather than the few.” This panel’s contributors find Cartmell’s concept of adaptation as the art form of democracy productive and enabling; however, the view is limited in its historical scope because it defines adaptation exclusively though the film and literature binary. This historical limitation is a trend in contemporary adaptation studies because scholars who write about the intersections between literature and today’s most popular media dominate the field. As a result, the history of adaptation remains largely underexplored and undertheorized in existing scholarship despite the explosion of adaptation studies over the last decade.
This panel is a historical intervention into the idea of adaptation as a democratic art form. Our research uncovers a similar model in the Romantic period, where democratizing adaptations were a product of revolutions in politics, arts, and culture. Each of the 20-minute presentations in this special session investigates adaptation through a different area of nineteenth-century cultural production: authorship, the publishing industry, and popular theater.
In “Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Robinson, and the Rise of Novelization, or Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” Glenn Jellenik locates adaptation’s democratic project as an extension of primary authorship. Following the French Revolution, British revolutionaries experimented with novelization and its capacity to deliver political and social philosophy to a rapidly growing reading public. William Godwin adapted his own Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) into Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft adapted A Vindication of The Rights of Woman (1792) into the novella Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), and Mary Robinson adapted Letter to the Women of England (1799) into The Natural Daughter (1799). These writers restructured their own philosophical treatises into a popular fictional genre (the gothic novel) in order to disseminate their ideas to a larger audience that, in Godwin’s words, “books of philosophy and science [were] never likely to reach.” Within this alternate historicizing of adaptation, the rise of novelization suggests that late-eighteenth-century adaptation functioned not only according to economic concerns but also as a potentially vital and subversive political tool. The presentation’s focus on writers adapting their own works also expands our current models of adaptation that all too frequently focus on how an author’s “original” ideas are changed or “lost” by adapters.
Elizabeth Neiman opens the conversation’s scope from singular authorship to collective publishing networks in “Romantic Adaptions: Minerva’s Shared Circuit of Popular Conventions.” Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane’s Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of sentimental and gothic novels (many of them by women authors). In recent years, particular attention has been paid to the Minerva Press for its role in inciting Romantic “anxiety,” Lucy Newlyn’s term for the period’s response to popular print culture. By showing that Minerva authors “adapt” language and conventions from philosophical and literary texts, we see that Romantic “anxiety” is better conceptualized as an “exchange,” seen here as a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics. Minerva’s derivative themes and otherwise “borrowed” material (e.g. character types and fashionable features such as poetry epigraphs) draw its authors into a shared circuit of production with writers now regarded as canonical, but then seen as competitors for a rapidly expanding readership. The presentation poses two central arguments. First, Minerva novelists react creatively to an increasingly stratified literary market by borrowing the rhetoric of “prolific” print culture (including references to the sublime and original genius as well as to circulating-library “trash”) to fashion an actively collaborative rather than passively derivative model of authorship. This model enables Minerva authors to contribute to debates over woman’s nature, the social order, and the literary market. Second, Minerva’s authorial model reverberates in Romantic poetics—in particular through Percy Shelley’s portrayal of the impassioned, inspired, prophetic poet in A Defence of Poetry. To this extent, the Minerva Press is a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Shelley’s conceptualization of the poet two decades later.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky’s “Hack Dramatists, Adaptations, and Collective Literacy in the Nineteenth Century” moves the analysis of adaptation and other forms of remixing from the printed page to the popular stage. The presentation reconceptualizes the role of “hack” dramatists such as Edward Fitzball, George Dibdin-Pitt, and others who earned a living by adapting various source materials into theatrical forms. Though famously attacked by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickelby (1839) as professional thieves fashioning themselves “literary gentlemen,” the period’s so-called hack dramatists undoubtedly contributed to the development of a cultural literacy among nineteenth-century theatergoers, offering them a shared language to discuss current events, historical battles, translated works, novels, and myths. Theatrical hacks remediated and repackaged texts for audiences across different social classes and political sensibilities—especially for working class audiences who might otherwise lack access to these stories in print. Given the strict censorship of the London stage with regard to both the content and form of theatrical entertainments, professional dramatists served as skilled intermediaries who navigated the complexities of licensing requirements and audience interests. Hack dramatists helped popularize the works of Scott, Hugo, Dickens, and many other nineteenth-century novelists by transforming their characters into household names and cultural icons. Instead of characterizing the relationship between novelists and theatrical “hacks” in antagonistic terms, we should reconsider the model as a complicated, yet productive exchange that extended and expanded the cultural reach of many now-canonical texts, best exemplified by the friendship between Scott and the actor-turned-dramatist-turned-theater manager Daniel Terry, who famously “Terry-fied” Scott’s novels into popular plays.
Together, the three presenters reconsider the relationship between historically focused literary scholarship and contemporary adaptation studies, while highlighting the democratic possibilities that exist through the intersections of “high” art and mass culture.
This panel is a historical intervention into the idea of adaptation as a democratic art form. Our research uncovers a similar model in the Romantic period, where democratizing adaptations were a product of revolutions in politics, arts, and culture. Each of the 20-minute presentations in this special session investigates adaptation through a different area of nineteenth-century cultural production: authorship, the publishing industry, and popular theater.
In “Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Robinson, and the Rise of Novelization, or Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” Glenn Jellenik locates adaptation’s democratic project as an extension of primary authorship. Following the French Revolution, British revolutionaries experimented with novelization and its capacity to deliver political and social philosophy to a rapidly growing reading public. William Godwin adapted his own Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) into Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft adapted A Vindication of The Rights of Woman (1792) into the novella Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), and Mary Robinson adapted Letter to the Women of England (1799) into The Natural Daughter (1799). These writers restructured their own philosophical treatises into a popular fictional genre (the gothic novel) in order to disseminate their ideas to a larger audience that, in Godwin’s words, “books of philosophy and science [were] never likely to reach.” Within this alternate historicizing of adaptation, the rise of novelization suggests that late-eighteenth-century adaptation functioned not only according to economic concerns but also as a potentially vital and subversive political tool. The presentation’s focus on writers adapting their own works also expands our current models of adaptation that all too frequently focus on how an author’s “original” ideas are changed or “lost” by adapters.
Elizabeth Neiman opens the conversation’s scope from singular authorship to collective publishing networks in “Romantic Adaptions: Minerva’s Shared Circuit of Popular Conventions.” Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane’s Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of sentimental and gothic novels (many of them by women authors). In recent years, particular attention has been paid to the Minerva Press for its role in inciting Romantic “anxiety,” Lucy Newlyn’s term for the period’s response to popular print culture. By showing that Minerva authors “adapt” language and conventions from philosophical and literary texts, we see that Romantic “anxiety” is better conceptualized as an “exchange,” seen here as a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics. Minerva’s derivative themes and otherwise “borrowed” material (e.g. character types and fashionable features such as poetry epigraphs) draw its authors into a shared circuit of production with writers now regarded as canonical, but then seen as competitors for a rapidly expanding readership. The presentation poses two central arguments. First, Minerva novelists react creatively to an increasingly stratified literary market by borrowing the rhetoric of “prolific” print culture (including references to the sublime and original genius as well as to circulating-library “trash”) to fashion an actively collaborative rather than passively derivative model of authorship. This model enables Minerva authors to contribute to debates over woman’s nature, the social order, and the literary market. Second, Minerva’s authorial model reverberates in Romantic poetics—in particular through Percy Shelley’s portrayal of the impassioned, inspired, prophetic poet in A Defence of Poetry. To this extent, the Minerva Press is a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Shelley’s conceptualization of the poet two decades later.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky’s “Hack Dramatists, Adaptations, and Collective Literacy in the Nineteenth Century” moves the analysis of adaptation and other forms of remixing from the printed page to the popular stage. The presentation reconceptualizes the role of “hack” dramatists such as Edward Fitzball, George Dibdin-Pitt, and others who earned a living by adapting various source materials into theatrical forms. Though famously attacked by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickelby (1839) as professional thieves fashioning themselves “literary gentlemen,” the period’s so-called hack dramatists undoubtedly contributed to the development of a cultural literacy among nineteenth-century theatergoers, offering them a shared language to discuss current events, historical battles, translated works, novels, and myths. Theatrical hacks remediated and repackaged texts for audiences across different social classes and political sensibilities—especially for working class audiences who might otherwise lack access to these stories in print. Given the strict censorship of the London stage with regard to both the content and form of theatrical entertainments, professional dramatists served as skilled intermediaries who navigated the complexities of licensing requirements and audience interests. Hack dramatists helped popularize the works of Scott, Hugo, Dickens, and many other nineteenth-century novelists by transforming their characters into household names and cultural icons. Instead of characterizing the relationship between novelists and theatrical “hacks” in antagonistic terms, we should reconsider the model as a complicated, yet productive exchange that extended and expanded the cultural reach of many now-canonical texts, best exemplified by the friendship between Scott and the actor-turned-dramatist-turned-theater manager Daniel Terry, who famously “Terry-fied” Scott’s novels into popular plays.
Together, the three presenters reconsider the relationship between historically focused literary scholarship and contemporary adaptation studies, while highlighting the democratic possibilities that exist through the intersections of “high” art and mass culture.