Emrys D. Jones – författare

Exploring how 18th-century forms and narrative are taken-up, recycled and re-visioned in contemporary media, this book asks which histories are told and by whom. Through essays from international and multidisciplinary scholars and interviews with industry professionals, The 18th Century Today asks what function modern media performs when depicting the 18th century in our current world. Can such works speak to perceived 18th-century ideas and values and, simultaneously, the shifting paradigms of our own time? How, and why, should we engage?Highlighting how contemporary depictions of the past give marginalised lives greater visibility, the role genre plays in re-enacting or re-interpreting 18th-century culture, and the potential for modern adaptation to transmute and transcend historical suffering, the essays in this volume dig into adaptation across theatre, film, prose fiction, television and games. Covering works such as The Great, Belle, Bridgerton and Black Sails among many others, this book is both reflection and celebration, an acknowledgement of the 18th century’s traumatic legacies alongside a sense of contemporary culture’s capacity for transformation, renewal and justice.

Studies of the eighteenth-century periodical have long tended to understand the form according to the period’s own insistence on adhering to and promoting politeness. In contrast, this collection reads for impoliteness, revealing a more nuanced, granular, and dynamic view of eighteenth-century periodicals such as Addison and Steele’s popular The Spectator, and a fuller sense of their value within the societies that produced and consumed them. By inverting the traditional focus, this volume promotes a new history of the periodical characterized not as highbrow gatekeeper of literary taste, but as incongruent, idiosyncratic, and impolite. Impolite Periodicals thus brings together a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century periodical publication, not simply to argue that periodicals could be impolite, but to explore how readings of their potential impoliteness might affect our understanding of their literary and social significance. This collection relishes and lingers on signs of rudeness, inconsistency, impurity, and failure.With an afterword by Manushag N. Powell.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Studies of the eighteenth-century periodical have long tended to understand the form according to the period’s own insistence on adhering to and promoting politeness. In contrast, this collection reads for impoliteness, revealing a more nuanced, granular, and dynamic view of eighteenth-century periodicals such as Addison and Steele’s popular The Spectator, and a fuller sense of their value within the societies that produced and consumed them. By inverting the traditional focus, this volume promotes a new history of the periodical characterized not as highbrow gatekeeper of literary taste, but as incongruent, idiosyncratic, and impolite. Impolite Periodicals thus brings together a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century periodical publication, not simply to argue that periodicals could be impolite, but to explore how readings of their potential impoliteness might affect our understanding of their literary and social significance. This collection relishes and lingers on signs of rudeness, inconsistency, impurity, and failure.With an afterword by Manushag N. Powell.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This book provides an expansive view of celebrity’s intimate dimensions. In the process, it offers a timely reassessment of how notions of private and public were negotiated by writers, readers, actors and audiences in the early to mid-eighteenth century.