Description: Nine authors from prominent universities around the world show how the adventurous thinkers, artists, and adventurers of the eighteenth-century period placed adaptation at the center of the quest for a modern civilization. The book will appeal to cultural historians, historians of science, and those interested in literary metamorphoses.
Review Quotes: "In his introduction to this book, David Fairer announces it as a contribution to 'adaptation studies'. . . .Fairer's argument that the word 'adapt' fundamentally changed meaning in the 18th century is learned . . . In the contributed essays one reads of early balloonists who lost their lives because they could not steer their craft or keep them aloft; punch bowls and punch drinking in 18th-century novels, signs of a newly globalized economy; Jamaican poet Olive Senior's 2007 poems about William Beckford of Fonthill, whose fabulous wealth derived from West Indian sugar; the development of a canon of Vietnamese literature." --Choice Reviews