This chapter grew out of a series of conversations about the opportunities and challenges of teaching eighteenth-century literature in general education courses. At the panel that served as the impetus for this collection, we discov- ered that we each teach Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and its adaptations as primary texts in our general education courses. We also discovered that our reasons for doing so and our assignments differed, as did our courses, which diverged at almost every point—geographic location, classroom mode (online or face-to-face), temporal span, outcome goals, and level and type of student. This chapter traces what we learned from our experiences, and from one another.

Our chapter, like Misty Krueger's and Catherine Ingrassia’s,aims to broaden the ways we think about and teach one of the most widely read and widely adapted authors of any century. But while our focus is on one particular novel and its adaptations, the teaching strategies and assignments we describe are portable to classes that assign different texts and adaptations. We hope that our chapter, like Jodi Wyett’s, highlights the value of teach- ing eighteenth-century texts in the general education classroom and offers useful teaching strategies for how to do so successfully across platforms and institutions.

Nora Nachumi's Interpretation and Adaptation was a five-week intro- ductory-level course taught online to undergraduates at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women and Yeshiva College for Men in New York City. Heather King's semester-long course—Jane Austen: Pride, Prejudice, and Adaptations—was an upper-level seminar at the University of Redlands in Southern California, and it was cross-listed among three departments: English Literature, Media and Visual Culture Studies (MVC), and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). Interpretation and Adaptation ful- filled the general education requirement of “interpreting literature and the arts” for students at Stern College for Women, and it counted toward the English major requirement for students on both campuses. Pride, Prejudice, and Adaptations fulfilled the general education requirement in the category “humanities: literature,” addressed student learning outcomes in all three majors with which it was cross-listed, and fulfilled the “early literature” requirement for English majors.