Introduction: Histories of the present

Tidying as We go: Constructing the Eighteenth Century through Adaptation in Becoming Jane, Gulliver’s Travels , and Crusoe

“…As Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich note about a different film adaptation, Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995), the film "flaunts a manic historical insouciance." 28 Lilliput becomes a museum, and as in a museum, as Umberto Eco or Susan Stewart would point out, by displaying objects from different periods all together, Lilliput collapses time and space into one display; in collections, Stewart notes, "all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection's world." 29 None of it has independent meaning, and the collection as a whole is by definition "a fake," in Eco's words.…”