Citizens of the World

ebook Adapting in the Eighteenth Century · Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850

By Samara Anne Cahill

cover image of Citizens of the World

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

Download Libby on the App Store Download Libby on Google Play

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Library Name Distance
Loading...
Citizens of the World investigates an area of eighteenth-century cultural, intellectual, and day-to-day life that many have seen but few have explored: adaptation. Throughout the long eighteenth century, adaptation happened repeatedly and in diverse forms: in the experience of travelers, merchants, and expatriates who made their way in foreign lands; in the adjustment of ancient literary norms to modern themes, concerns, and expectations; in the development of scientific apparatus for the probing of newly-discovered phenomena; in translating; in the adjusting of familiar architecture for new environments; in speculating about and making provision for the future reception of contemporary works; in the tempering and symphonizing of musical instruments; and in dozens of other no less important ways. The eight essays in this book, composed by scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, provide the first panoramic view of adaptation during the Enlightenment. Essays delve into such diverse forms of adaptation as the representation of cultural interchange on porcelain serving pieces; the attempt to come to terms with the demands of air travel through the often cumbersome technology of ballooning; the relevance of the English Enlightenment to present-day Caribbean literature; piracy as a form of recalibration; Vietnamese verse; Georgic envisioning of ecological stability; and the uncanny interactions of French provincial architecture with both eighteenth-century dwellers and their descendants. Cumulatively, the essays illuminate the process by which eighteenth-century thinkers, artists, and adventurers elevated adaptation from a mere necessity to a stimulating, happily unending cultural project.
Citizens of the World