In Pursuit of Jane Austen — Jane Austen’s Characters and Their Adaptability From Literature To Film Fiction

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation elaborates on the types of Jane Austen’s protagonists and the processes that took place while adapting them for film. It analyses the adaptive operations and seeks to provide the answers to such research questions as: how do film adaptations reflect the images of Jane Austen’s protagonists and present their distinctive personality traits?; what changes are introduced in the original themes in order to adjust to the tastes and expectations of a late twentieth century/ early twenty-first century recipient?; what is the effect of such modifications on the image of Austen’s characters? The types of literary characters created by Austen are compared to their film counterparts, with respect to film style and these adaptation strategies that serve to portray selected features of a literary prototype in film. The dissertation consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter serves as an introduction to further analyses which centre on loose adaptations. The second chapter provides the analysis of adaptations that modernise the plot and move the action to Britain or the USA at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The third chapter centres on the analysis of movies which follow different genre conventions than their literary source texts and their heritage adaptations, i.e. romantic comedies and horror films (and their parodic variants). The fourth chapter focuses on the works that transfer the action of the novel to a different (but also distant) cultural circle—those are Indian and Chinese adaptations of Jane Austen’s prose.