ABSTRACT
Academic writing on the movie industry's appropriation of the eighteenth century has tended to focus on adaptations of canonical novels, but what we are calling "the cinematic eighteenth century" is truly a mosaic of different genres and artistic visions. This chapter brings together multiple eighteenth-century contexts such as literary, historical, political, and philosophical, and examines such topics through methodologies of film theory and literary analysis. It presents the adaptations of canonical novels such as Austen's Sense and Sensibility and sci-fi adaptations of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to the appropriation of historical figures like King Charles II and the iconography of the Declaration of Independence. Similarly, Elizabeth Kraft's essay "The King on the Screen" surveys movies from the 1920s to the present that feature the similarly iconic Charles II in order to interrogate how celebrity is culturally constructed and how that construction is in part a production of our collective fantasy for an authority figure above and beyond legal constraints.
