Theorizing Adaptation in the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter 2 documents that, in contrast to more recent theories that have rendered adaptation a bad theoretical object, prior to the late eighteenth century, adaptation was theorized as a good theoretical object, fostering an innovative, progressive, national aesthetic culture and situating artists in a long lineage reaching back to classical Greece. Subsequently, late eighteenth-century Romantic theories of originality and theories of the arts as separate species militated against adaptation in the same way that theologies of original creation and scientific theories of separate species would militate against theories of biological adaptation in the late nineteenth century. Even so, some nineteenth-century theorists continued to valorize adaptation equivocally as a means of civilizing the lower classes and foreign cultures, even as its aesthetic deficiencies offended the higher ranked, fiercely nationalist arbiters of civilization and culture. Copyright laws, which did not apply when a work changed medium until the early twentieth century in Britain and other nations, intensified the opprobrium cast upon adaptation in a rhetoric of theft at home and piracy abroad. Even so, some critics maintained that adaptation is original when created by an original genius; others valorized intermedial adaptation in a pseudo-religious discourse of realization of the word made flesh; yet others pitted sister arts theories against theories of the arts as separate species that cannot mate to produce adaptation, although both militated against the reproductive, generative capacities of adaptation. These discourses were not limited to academics and reviewers, but extended to the adaptation industry.