A Breath of Fresh Eyre

Another very interesting book published this year:

A Breath of Fresh Eyre. Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre.
RUBIK, Margarete and Elke METTINGER-SCHARTMANN (Eds.)
Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007, 418 pp.
Hb: 978-90-420-2212-6
€ 84 / US$ 118
Series: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 111

Ever since its publication in 1847 Jane Eyre – one of the most popular English novels of all time – has fascinated scholars and a wide reading public alike and has proved a source of inspiration to successive generations of creative writers and artists. There is hardly any other hypotext that has been re-worked in so many adaptations for stage and screen, has inspired so many painters and musicians, and has been so often imitated, re-written, parodied or extended by prequels and sequels. New versions in turn refer to and revise older rewritings or take up suggestions from Brontë scholarship, creating a dense intertextual web.
The essays collected in this volume do justice to the variety of media involved in the Jane Eyre reworkings, by covering narrative, visual and stage adaptations, including an adaptor’s perspective. Contributions review a diverse range of works, from postcolonial revision to postmodern fantasy, from imaginary after-lives to science fiction, from plays and Hollywood movies to opera, from lithographs and illustrated editions to comics and graphic novels.
The volume thus offers a comprehensive collection of reworkings that also takes into account recent novels, plays and works of art that were published after Patsy Stoneman’s seminal 1996 study on Brontë Transformations.

Table of Contents
Margarete RUBIK and Elke METTINGER-SCHARTMANN: Introduction
Prologue: A General Survey
Barbara SCHAFF: The Strange After-Lives of Jane Eyre
Part I: Novel Adaptations
Bárbara ARIZTI: The Future That Has Happened: Narrative Freedom and Déjà lu in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Thomas LOE: Landscape and Character in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Wolfgang G. MÜLLER: The Intertextual Status of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: Dependence on a Victorian Classic and Independence as a Post-Colonial Novel
Ines DETMERS: ‘The Second Mrs. Rochesters’: Telling Untold Stories of Jane Eyre’s (Im-)Possible Married Lives
Sue THOMAS: Pathologies of Sexuality, Empire and Slavery: D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte
Maggie TONKIN: Brontë Badland: Jane Eyre Reconfigured as Colonial Gothic in Mardi McConnochie’s Coldwater
Ursula KLUWICK: Jane’s Angry Daughters: Anger in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy
Jürgen WEHRMANN: Jane Eyre in Outer Space: Victorian Motifs in Post-Feminist Science Fiction
Margarete RUBIK: Invasions into Literary Texts, Re-plotting and Trans-fictional Migration in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair
Mark BERNINGER and Katrin THOMAS: A Parallelquel of a Classic Text and Reification of the Fictional – the Playful Parody of Jane Eyre in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair
Juliette WELLS: An Eyre-Less Affair? Jasper Fforde’s Seeming Elision of Jane
Verena-Susanna NUNGESSER: From Thornfield Hall to Manderley and Beyond: Jane Eyre and Rebecca as Transformations of the Fairy Tale, the Novel of Development, and the Gothic Novel
Part II: Visual Adaptations – Film and other Pictorial Media
Sarah WOOTTON: “Picturing in me a hero of romance”: The Legacy of Jane Eyre’s Byronic Hero
Carol M. DOLE: Children in the Jane Eyre Films
Marla HARRIS: Reader, She Married Him: Abridging and Adapting Jane Eyre for Children and Young Adults
Norbert BACHLEITNER: Jane Eyre for Young Readers: Three Illustrated Adaptations
Michaela BRAESEL: Jane Eyre Illustrated
Aline FERREIRA: Paula Rego’s Visual Adaptations of Jane Eyre
Part III: Stage Adaptations – Opera and Drama
Walter BERNHART: Myth-making Opera: David Malouf and Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre
Bruno LESSARD: The Madwoman in the Classic: Intermediality, Female Subjectivity, and Dance in Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre
Jarmila MILDORF: Mad Intertextuality: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, After Mrs Rochester
Kathleen STARCK: “From a Land of Hot Rain and Hurricanes” – Polly Teale’s Stage Adaptation of Jane Eyre
Elke METTINGER-SCHARTMANN: John Brougham’s Stage Adaptation of Jane Eyre – a Marxist Reading of Brontë’s Novel?
Rainer EMIG: Blasting Jane: Jane Eyre as an Intertext of Sarah Kane’s Blasted
Epilogue: A Dramatiser’s Point-of-View
Michelene WANDOR: Reader: Who Wrote You? An Autocritical Exercise upon Jane Eyre
Notes on Contributors

If you are interested in reworkings of Jane Eyre, we can recommend another recent book reviewed by BrontëBlog a few weeks ago: Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898 by Patsy Stoneman, published by Ashgate.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Scholar