Screening Austen ' s Pride and Prejudice in Transcultural Britain (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Screening Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Transcultural Britain: Joe Wright’s Little England and Gurinder Chadha’s Global Village.” Transcultural Britain. Special Issue of Journal for the Study of British Cultures 15.1 (2008). Eds Bernd-Peter Lange and Dirk Wiemann. 43-58.
Throughout the 1990s, the long-standing tradition of' Austenmania' and 'Janeism' culminated in a large number of filmic adaptations of Jane Austen's novels, which inspired critics to coin inventive terms such as' Austen Powers' and 'Janespotting'. In the current decade, both literary and filmic rewritings of Austen's work have once again found large and enthusiastic audiences. Austen remains a cultural fetish, whose status is only loosely connected to her actual writings, as Claudia Johnson emphasises: "loving - or hating - her has typically implied meanings well beyond any encoded in her works" (1997: 212). In the following, I will focus on two of the more recent adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, which is not only acknowledged as the most popular narrative of Austen's oeuvre, but has also recently been elected the second-best loved book in the UK. Given the enormous popularity of Austen's novel to the present day, its cultural significance seems out of question. Questions that do arise, however, are: Why is the novel so popular? Which aspects make it attractive to the present day? The filmic adaptations of the novel can help to illuminate the issue, since they, for economic reasons, have to appeal to the tastes and interests of the majority of Austen fans as well as to those audiences who are unfamiliar with the novels. Directors Gurinder Chadha and Joe Wright and their teams worked almost simultaneously on adaptations of Austen's classic. Their films Bride and Prejudice and Pride and Prejudice, which were released in the UK within eleven months of each other in October 2004 and September 2005 respectively, give contrasting answers to questions regarding the novel's relevance for present-day cultural concerns.
This thesis deals with film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. This work examines how this particular novel has been translated into film and the issues that arise from changing media. This study focuses on five different films [Pride and Prejudice (1980), Pride and Prejudice (1995), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)] and their relationship to the book and adaptation theory. To provide the reader with a greater understanding of adaptation theory, this thesis will include a section briefly outlining current adaptation studies followed by in-depth analyses of each film in comparison to the novel and theory.
“Till This Moment I Never Knew Myself”: Adapting Pride and Prejudice
Anafora, 2017
Adaptations are always a matter of hard choices: the scriptwriter and the director have their interpretations of what an adaptation should be, very much like every reader has his/her own vision of the characters and the plot, and very rarely do the two visions coincide. This paper was inspired by the ongoing debate amongst Jane Austen fans on Internet forums as to which adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is more faithful to the 1813 novel. The main two contenders appear to be the 1995 BBC mini-series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and Joe Wright's 2005 film with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen in the lead roles. This paper will attempt to identify the cardinal points of Austen's Pride and Prejudice to illustrate that both the 1995 and 2005 adaptations are faithful to the original. Furthermore, it shall look at the strengths and weaknesses of the mini-series and the feature film as genres, before analysing the respective strengths and weaknesses of the adaptations themselves. The paper will suggest that Wright's film fully captures "the spirit" of Austen's novel through its masterful use of point of view and symbolism in less than half the time the 1995 mini-series does.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have become renowned for encapsulating the author’s ironic point of view on the relationships between the sexes within the marriage plot. However, two cinematic adaptations of the novel chose distinctly different approaches for their versions of the opening scene. The BBC’s 1995 miniseries opens with a scene featuring the two male leads and is packed with masculine energy. The opening of the 2005 film adaptation, however, introduces us to our heroine in pastoral and serene surroundings. It seems that the BBC version was interested in privileging Darcy’s character, and while many critics view this as a radical move, I believe the end result is a production more traditional than the original novel. Hollywood, however, was interested in drawing a young female audience to identify with a free spirited heroine. The choices made in the opening scene have a tremendous effect on the cinematic work as a whole and also raise important questions regarding the manipulation of a literary masterpiece for the sake of commercial success.
Literature and cinema: images of femininity in pride and prejudice
2008
By comparing the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen with an American filmic version from 1940, the article draws attention to the shift in the focus of the two narratives. While the novel provides alternative possibilities for the stories of the female characters, the filmic version chooses to reinforce an idealized image of social harmony.
Persuasions On-Line 27.2, 2007
In L’Adaptation cinématographique des textes littéraires Michel Serceau argues that film-makers and film critics have often considered film adaptation in terms of binaries like translation/creation, faithfulness/originality, transcription/interpretation, etc. (13-20). Wright’s film clearly tries “to assert that it is the ‘real’ Pride and Prejudice” (Hudelet 124) while emphasizing that it is a personal work which the director says he “put [his] heart into” [62:50].1 Wright claims not to have seen the BBC series of 1995 (Hudelet 107). I want to look at the ways the film, at a metafictional level, thematizes the process of adapting a literary text to the screen, and how the film justifies its conception of film adaptation in relation to the response it anticipates from the contemporary spectator. I will start by showing how the representation of reading books is based on an opposition between a critical and sensitive reading and a reading that merely takes in a dominant discourse, an opposition which reflects, at a metafictional level, the distinction film critics have often made between a creative adaptation and an adaptation that is a mere transcription of the source text. I will then deal with the representation and function of letters, which likewise participate in this thematization of adaptation, but also point at the difficulty of film, as a medium, to capture text in a dynamic way.