Linda Troost

Jane Austen in Hollywood

In 1995 and 1996 six film or television adaptations of Jane Austens 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. Austens ridicule of deceit and pretentiousness also appeals to our fin de siecle sensibilities. The novels were changed, however, to enhance their appeal to a wide popular audience, and the revisions reveal much about our own culture and its values. These recent productions espouse explicitly twentieth-century feminist notions and reshape the Austenian hero to make him conform to modern expectations. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield present fourteen essays examining the phenomenon of Jane Austen as cultural icon, providing thoughtful and sympathetic insights on the films through a variety of critical approaches. The contributors debate whether these productions enhance or undercut the subtle feminism that Austen promoted in her novels. From Persuasion to Pride and Prejudice , from the three Emmas (including Clueless ) to Sense and Sensibility , these films succeed because they flatter our intelligence and education. And they have as much to tell us about ourselves as they do about the world of Jane Austen. This second edition includes a new chapter on the recent film version of Mansfield Park .

“Strange mutations”: Shakespeare, Austen and cultural success

Works of literature prosper not through simple reproduction but through reinterpretations, quotations and transformations. Jane Austens novels are now undergoing what seems a peculiar mutation indeed, being blended with material from modern horror films to comic effect. These current travesties heighten a process that has been going on since 1995, when a slew of Austen films and novelistic rewritings of her life began to hit popular culture with particular intensity. This movement of a literary figure from cultural prominence to megastardom – through adaptation of genre, resetting, hybridization and even travesty – has precedent with Shakespeare himself. This essay looks at the tripartite forces of transformation that created and marked Shakespeares rise to extraordinary fame in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and which are creating and marking Austens further rise in the late twentieth and early twenty-first: adaptation, travesty and fictionalization of the author.

The Importance of Being Austen

tions aroused by reflection on the subject of privacy in a time when, a place where, privacy had no legal status and in which its social meanings remained ambiguous and confused” (15). Reexamining the textual tangles surrounding the issue of privacy allows for a critical reconsideration of the debate on public and private spheres not only in the eighteenth century but also in our own times, in which the “right of the individual to be left alone” has, once more, become a contested and debated topic.