Representing restoration, enlightenment and romanticism

The essays in this Festschrift in honour of Hans-Peter Wagner’s 65th birthday combine the dedicatee’s two major research interests: the long eighteenth century and intermediality. Focussing on contemporary literary and cinematic representations of the long eighteenth century, the contributors trace in this “new-eighteenth-century” literature and film a self-reflexive mode of cultural re-presentation which, like Neo-Victorianism, engages with the past in order to foreground its significance for the present. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the common notion of crisis, the lack of closure or definite answers suggest that the eighteenth century will continue to incite increasing interest for literary, filmic and artistic adaptations in the future and that the very incoherence of this period can become productive for subcultural “new-eighteenth-century” bricolage.