ENGL 628 Jane Eyre Neo-Victorian Appropriations Dashboard
Description
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) is a seminal text in the Western feminist literature canon, published fifty-five years after Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a year before the Seneca Falls convention launched the feminist movement in Western culture. Scores of authors, directors, and digital producers have attempted not just to adapt but to appropriate, revise, and modernize Charlotte Bronte’s most famous novel. Antonija Primorac contends that the current vogue of neo-Victorianism is “a powerful trend in contemporary Anglophone media” pointing to the “continuous production of adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture.” In order to be considered neo-Victorian, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn posit that “texts (literary, filmic, audio / visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (emphasis in original). In this class, we will explore the creative and rhetorical choices twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors have made when appropriating, revising, and modernizing Jane Eyre’s narrative, paying particular attention to gender ideology in the Victorian era and in more recent times. In this course, we will also leverage the new media capabilities of the COVE (Central Online Victorian Educator) web site in order to examine more deeply the impact of multimodal writing and digital technology on literary studies in the twenty-first century.
Individual Entries
As I have been reading Jane Eyre I'm reminded of a project that I did as part of a class in undergrad with Dr. Jen Boyle regarding the creation of the Gutenberg Press and tracking literacy rates in Europe. I think that tracing literary references throughout Jane Eyre could be a tedious, yet fulfilling prospect of connecting literacy rates, patterns of speech, and maybe help readers understand connections between the scholarship of our author Charlotte Bronte and of the time of Jane Eyre's publishing in 1847.
It is important to show the educational background she gives Jane in the novel, by continuing to reference Biblical, Poetic, Literature, and...
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