Stephanie Russo

Austen Approved: Pemberley Digital and the Transmedia Commodification of Jane Austen

ABSTRACT The web video production company Pemberley Digital is most notable for their YouTube adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the internet sensation The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Pemberley Digital specialises in the creation of transmedia adaptations of texts, with content stretching across a variety of platforms. However, their 2013–2014 adaptation of Emma, Emma Approved, is, by Pemberley Digitals own admission, the companys boldest experiment with the commodification potential of Jane Austens novels. Emma Approved played out over five platforms: video, blog posts, photographs, social media and music. After watching the videos, viewers are encouraged to click on links to purchase the clothes worn, or technological devices used by, the characters, incorporating product placement and advertorial into the text of Emma Approved. Pemberley Digitals unique transmedia adaptation is a distinctly twenty-first century manifestation of Jane Austens afterlife: one that privileges a multi-dimensional, interactive “bite-sized” experience of texts, and one that seeks to transform the cultural capital associated with Austen into profit. The texts are rendered malleable to a transmedia storytelling mode across multiple digital platforms. The Pemberley Digital productions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma speak to the twenty- and twenty-first centurys impulse to turn Jane Austen into a marketable, profitable commodity.

“The writer died at Autun in her 26th year”: genre, health tourism and Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée

In Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), Anna Jameson notoriously combines what is otherwise a rather conventional travel narrative with the romantic tale of its languishing female narrator. The narrative concludes with the death of the narrator, and this overtly fictional element in what otherwise presents itself as a factual piece of writing has proved immensely troubling for readers of Jameson’s text from its initial publication until today. Variously read as a failed experiment and/or a hoax, Jameson’s work is instead, I argue, a parodic exploration of both the growing interest in health tourism, as well as a satiric engagement with the burgeoning genre of invalid travel literature. Diary of an Ennuyee is not a mistake, an aberration, or a hoax, but rather should be read as a lively, self-reflexive satire on the contemporary fashion for seeking health on foreign shores, and writing about it.

The Damsel of Brittany: Mary Robinson's Angelina, Tyranny and the 1790s

ABSTRACT The Romantic novelist Mary Robinson had a life-long sentimental attachment to Marie Antoinette, transforming her into a persecuted heroine whose story paralleled Robinsons own. What has been overlooked in the critical literature is her similar engagement with the obscure Angevin princess, Eleanor of Brittany, in her third novel Angelina (1796). The inset history of Eleanor functions as a thematic parallel to the romantic travails of Sophia Clarendon, who struggles to avoid a forced marriage. Eleanor also functions as a means by which Robinson can think through ideas relating to tyranny and the need for liberal reform. Eleanor, a long-term prisoner of King John, becomes the muse through which Robinson invites the reader to contemplate a rejuvenated social order in which merit is valued above arbitrary privilege. Robinson posits the possibility of a meritorious aristocracy, built in the image of the reforming barons who compelled John to sign the Magna Carta.

“Where Virtue Struggles Midst a Maze of Snares”: Mary Robinson's Vancenza (1792) and the Gothic Novel

Mary Robinsons Vancenza (1792) has received almost no critical attention, despite its popularity at the time it was written. The Gothic framework of Vancenza is employed to explore the fact that female transgression in the eighteenth century was seen as so damaging to the social order that it can continue to inflict pain and suffering on a second generation. Robinson plays with the conventions of the Gothic novel, presenting a range of pseudo-villains and evaded acts of violence, only to reveal that the true Gothic narrative of the novel is a part of the novels history, not its present. In displacing the Gothic narrative to the past, Robinson shields her heroine, Elvira, from the seduction narrative while emphasizing the impossibility of her escape from the tragic denouement of her mothers seduction narrative. Robinson allows Madeline Vancenza, the archetypal Gothic victim, a voice, uncovering her repressed story from concealment, only to emphasize womens utter powerlessness in the face of patriarchal power. Vancenza is a profoundly pessimistic novel in its representation of the social order—Robinsons bleakest statement on the lack of options available to women in a world where the stain of female transgression cannot even be washed away by death.

Place in Charlotte Smith's The Banished Man and Walter Scott's Woodstock

Smith’s The Banished Man and Scott’s Woodstock contain a considered analysis of the social impacts of revolution and the potential for ideology to warp into an ugly reality of principles abandoned. The concept of place is intrinsic to each author’s arguments and can be explored through Malpasian concepts of regional mapping and nesting as the means for tracing the developments and the consequences of revolution in these two novels. J. E. Malpas’s notions of place form a prism through which to view both Smith’s and Scott’s explorations of the various ideological stances and associated domestic and political issues. In The Banished Man, Smith uses place to construct a revolutionary position grounded in cosmopolitanism. Scott’s focus on place enables him to establish a very different argument in Woodstock, maintaining a counterrevolutionary position but a wary, qualified one.