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.

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Chronology Entry
Posted by Alyssa Isaac on Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - 09:38
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Posted by Rob Sperduto on Monday, October 7, 2019 - 20:28

The town of Hawick, Scotland, is located seven miles (Livesey 109) from the Claypoole boarding school that Gemma Hardy attends. In Chapter Six, Mr. Milne explains the distance to her. Gemma informs the reader, "Then he told me how to get to the school and, thinking I would need to reverse this journey someday, I paid close attention. First we drove five miles to the village of Denholm. There we crossed the river Teviot and drove two more miles to the village of Minto" (50). 

And pay attention she did. Gemma eventually reverses her journey when her best friend, Miriam Goodall, falls ill due to a chronic case of asthma and is transported from Claypoole to a hospital in Hawick. Gemma sneaks away from the school and travels by foot to be with Miriam during her dying moments, but it's no easy feat for her. She remarks, The Romans had marched through Britain at four miles an hourl I could be there in two hours. Perhaps even less, since running" (109).

According to...

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Posted by Parag Desai on Monday, October 7, 2019 - 14:18
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Posted by Brittany Atkinson on Sunday, October 6, 2019 - 15:22
Blog entry
Posted by KENNETH LAREMORE on Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 13:54

Gemma Hardy p. 297

Gemma refers to this clock when she is waiting for Mr. White at the jewelry shop in Kirkwall, wanting to pawn her watch for much needed funds. She glances at a wall in the shop and sees a variety of clocks on the wall, spurring her memory of the one at St. Magnus cathedral.

The St. Magnus cathedral clock in Kirkwall was built during the First World War in Edinburgh by James Ritchie and Son, makers of the famous Floral Clock in Princes Street Gardens. It was eventually transported to Orkney and installed in 1919, just as the conflict ended.

The clock features a winding mechanism, a pendulum, a set of weights and a large clock face. To wind it, custodians have had to make their way into the upper levels of the cathedral and slide the glass doors of the large winding mechanism case open. There they were faced with three large cylindrical drums wrapped in steel cables. The drums regulated the chiming of the hourly and quarterly bells...

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Chronology Entry
Posted by Parag Desai on Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 13:05
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Posted by Parag Desai on Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 12:54
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Posted by madison rahner on Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 10:36
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Posted by madison rahner on Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 08:36
Chronology Entry
Posted by madison rahner on Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 07:50

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