| Description |
18th-century literature may now be less widely read than that of any other period--yet current film and fiction almost obsessively revisits it. What does that say about the present--and about how we understand the 18th century? Why the popularity of such "costume drama"? How does film, that quintessentially modern medium, reinterpret or translate the 18th-century novel, and why so often? We'll read several important 18th-century European novels, some of which have received more than one film treatment, and examine the films as "translations" of those novels, and the cultures that produced them, into 20th and 21st-century visual terms. |