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I am an expert on Jane Austen, especially on film adaptations of the novels. With Sayre Greenfield, I edited the first book on the adaptions: Jane Austen in Hollywood. I am also interested in transmediation--the transfer of a text from one medium into another.
The year 2025 has been devoted to the novelist Jane Austen because of her quarter-of-a-millennium birthday anniversary on December 16. Why does everyone want a piece of Jane? How did this love of Austen become so widespread?
Jane Austen has long been regarded as a quintessential part of Britain's heritage. Recent updates of Austen's novels, however, demonstrate that her plots and characters can move far beyond the confines of the early nineteenth-century English village and allow reflection on the continuities and discontinuities between Austen's milieu and our own.
"'Hush! I am interrupted.'" That opening line from The Mystery, one of Jane Austen's juvenile dramas, shows the author, from her youngest days as a writer, happy to make the inscrutable fragment part of her literary display ( Juvenilia 71). It is therefore sadly fitting that her final work of fiction should be interrupted and left fragmentary.
When contemplating Northanger Abbey, one almost instantly thinks "gothic," inspired by Catherine's enthusiasm for "ancient edifices" (143), for "the heaviest stonework, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs" (166), for the past. This essay, however, argues that Northanger Abbey is not a novel centrally about the gothic.
What people thought and wrote about Jane Austen in the nineteenth century may both puzzle us and help expand our understanding of the novels. These earlier reactions are not like ours, but they may take us out of our narrowed habits of response by showing us alternatives.
PDF of slides for a panel presentation on Jane-Austen and Regency-themed video games.
E MMA HAS RECENTLY HAD ADAPTATIONS AROUND THE WORLD: an updated version set in Los Angeles, another set in Delhi, and a classic serial from the BBC. All three adaptations share features that do not derive from Austen's novel but that show values of the twenty-first century, sometimes satirized, and sometimes celebrated.
We have combed books (paper and digital), newspapers (old and new), and the Internet for non-academic and journalistic commentary on Fanny Price in an attempt to chronicle a popular reception history of Mansfield Park’s heroine— the mixed reactions of the novel’s first readers, the glowing admiration of Victorians, her decline at the end of the nineteenth century, and the resurgence of appreciation for her in recent times.
"Exhibiting one of the grandest and most interesting Spectacles that ever engaged the Feelings of Mankind; including, amongst a Variety of other striking Matters incident to the Event, the Whole of the Plan, Attack, Storming, Capture, and Demolition of that horrid Sepulcher of a People, the Bastille … together with the Proceedings that gave Freedom to the Empire of France."
If Jane Austen had wanted to write about zombies, what might she have known about the walking dead in the early nineteenth century? In this 2010 presidential address for EC/ASECS, subsequently published in the society's newsletter, I examine this question and take a look at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
This essay looks at the tripartite forces of transformation that created and marked Shakespeare’s rise to extraordinary fame in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and which are creating and marking Jane Austen’s further rise in the late twentieth and early twenty-first: adaptation, travesty and fictionalization of the author.
This article examines the Pemberley sequence in three screen adaptations of "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen to see how the touristic moment can be used to reveal a character’s understanding of him/herself and others, as well as the reader/viewer’s relationship with the past.
In 1995 and 1996 six film or television adaptations of Jane Austen's novels were produced―an unprecedented number. More amazing, all were critical and/or box office successes. What accounts for this explosion of interest? Much of the appeal of these films lies in our nostalgic desire at the end of the millennium for an age of greater politeness and sexual reticence. Austen's ridicule of deceit and pretentiousness also appeals to our fin de siècle sensibilities. The novels were changed,...