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Austenland and Narrative Tensions in Austen’s Biopics

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Abstract

This chapter explores how the popular film Austenland (2013) comically exposes some of the narrative conventions and tensions, which are apparent in two earlier Austen biopics: Becoming Jane (2007) and Miss Austen Regrets (2008). The wish to celebrate Austen’s historical otherness and difference is shown to be held in an uneasy balance with a desire to investigate the contemporary relevance of her life and work. The film Austenland, I conclude, offers a playful, and kindly, parodic version of biopics and classical literary adaptations, while still reaffirming the transformative romantic love central to such retellings. Moreover, it is proposed that Austenland, the location in the film, with its performed and constructed version of Austen’s life and works, stands as an ironic representation of Austen biopics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Deborah Cartmell, ‘Familiarity versus Contempt: Becoming Jane and the Adaptation Genre’, in Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film and the Arts, edited by Pascal Niklas and Oliver Lindner (Berlin: DEU, 2012), 25–33, 25–6.

  2. 2.

    Cartmell, ‘Familiarity versus Contempt’, 26.

  3. 3.

    Cartmell, ‘Familiarity versus Contempt’, 26.

  4. 4.

    Cartmell, ‘Familiarity versus Contempt’, 230.

  5. 5.

    Ellen Cheshire, Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Wallflower Press, 2012), 5.

  6. 6.

    Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 10.

  7. 7.

    Andrew Higson, ‘Brit-lit biopics’, The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship, edited by Judith Buchanan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan 2013), 106–120, 109.

  8. 8.

    Judith Buchanan, ‘Image, story, desire: the writer on film’, in The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship, edited by Judith Buchanan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3–34, 10.

  9. 9.

    Deborah Cartmell, ‘Pride and Prejudice and the Adaptation genre’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 3.3 (2010), 227–24, 28.

  10. 10.

    Julian North, ‘Conservative Austen, Radical Austen’, in Adaptations: Text to Screen, Screen to Text, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. (London: Routledge 1999), p. 38.

  11. 11.

    Imelda Whelehan, ‘Adaptations: The Contemporary dilemmas’, in Adaptations: Text to Screen, Screen to Text, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London: Routledge, 1999) 3–20, 8.

  12. 12.

    This now proverbial phrase originated as a caption to a cartoon in Alan Parker’s Making Movies (1998). The comment was directed particularly towards films made by the Merchant-Ivory team, especially Howard’s End (1992).

  13. 13.

    Eckart Voigts-Virchow, ‘Heritage and Literature on Screen: Heimat and heritage’, in Literature on Screen, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 123–137, 128–9.

  14. 14.

    Erica Sheen, ‘“Where the garment gapes”: faithfulness and promiscuity in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice’, in The Classic Novel: from Page to Screen, edited by Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 23–4.

  15. 15.

    Clare Tomalin, Jane Austen: a Life (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1997); Jon Spence, Becoming Jane Austen (London: Continuum, 2007); John Halperin, ‘Jane Austen’s Lovers’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 25.4 (Autumn 1985), 719–36.

  16. 16.

    Lisa Hopkins, Relocating Shakespeare and Austen on Screen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009), p. 145.

  17. 17.

    Deborah Cartmell, ‘Becoming Jane in screen adaptations of Austen’s fiction’, in The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship, edited by Judith Buchanan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013), 151–162, 155.

  18. 18.

    Graham Holderness, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2011), 24.

  19. 19.

    Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 3.

  20. 20.

    Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 119.

  21. 21.

    Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia, ‘Introduction: Picturesque Maps of Austenland’, in Re-drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland, edited by Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2004), 1.

  22. 22.

    Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 107 and 126.

  23. 23.

    Higson, ‘Brit-lit biopics’, 109.

  24. 24.

    Voigts-Virchow, ‘Heritage and Literature on Screen’, 128.

  25. 25.

    Hopkins, Relocating Shakespeare and Austen on Screen, 140.

  26. 26.

    Julian North, ‘Jane Austen’s Life on Page and Screen’, in Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives, edited by Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), 111.

  27. 27.

    C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form in Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 4.

  28. 28.

    See Cartmell, ‘Becoming Jane in screen adaptations of Austen’s fiction’.

  29. 29.

    Dwight Macdonald, ed., Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohn and After (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), xiii.

  30. 30.

    Linda Hutcheon, ‘Parody Without Ridicule – Observations on Modern Literary Parody’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 52 (1978), 201–11, 202.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

    Janice Wardle

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  1. Janice Wardle
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Correspondence to Janice Wardle .

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  1. Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

    Lisa Hopkins

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Wardle, J. (2018). Austenland and Narrative Tensions in Austen’s Biopics. In: Hopkins, L. (eds) After Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95894-1_12

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