Talk:Jane Austen in popular culture

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Alylope123.

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Filmography

I have a few issues with this page.

• The section named "Filmography" includes film and television. Wikipedia defines filmography as film only. It would make more sense to organize the categories by work and use "Film," "Televison," and "Plays and Musicals" as subcategories. The subcategory "Plays and Musicals" should be renamed into the collective "Theater." "Adaptations" is ambiguous, because it can be confused with 'faithful' adaptations of the work. It should be renamed "Related Works" and made as a sub subcategory of "Film," "Television," and "Theater" depending upon availability. "Pop Culture References" should be another sub subcategory (just like "Related Works" should also be added upon availability).

• The works of Jane Austen are in a random order. I organized by their date of publication. Jane Austen herself should be added as a category since her life as been adapted into several formats a few times.

• The page should also be in a chart format, so I'll be working on it slowly.

I hope this greatly improves the overall appearance and format of the article. If anyone has any objections to the proposed changes, please post them here. ImperialJaineite (talk) 19:27, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Guidelines

According to Wikipedia Guidelines, the article should be in prose, not table/chart/bulleted form. So, I'll be working on that. Citations are also needed. ImperialJaineite (talk) 21:00, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

That depends - you could make it a list (see these featured lists for some models). Lists are supposed to be in table form. Citations are definitely needed, though, yes. Awadewit (talk) 22:05, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you :), I hadn't noticed that! I was looking at the Popular Culture Guidelines. ImperialJaineite (talk) 01:55, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

I am curious about the consistency of language throughout the article. I noticed that in the beginning there was British standard used ("honoured"), but later on "color" was used in the American standard of writing. Is there one that should be used over the other? Migottlieb (talk) 20:20, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Merge List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice [RESOLVED]

List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice should be merged to this article. Even though I know "List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice" is very long, I believe merging it to this article will help keep Pride and Prejudice at a reasonable length and avoid listcruft. It will also make it easier for users to find since "Jane Austen in Popular Culture" is a lot easier to remember/look up than "List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice." It would also be nice to have all the information in one place rather than scattered everywhere. Please discuss, should List of artistic depictions of and related to Pride and Prejudice be merged to this article? ImperialJaineite (talk) 02:35, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

• Support merge. No need to be separate. Reywas92^Talk 02:55, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose complete merge. The P&P-depictions article is too long (nearly as long as the entire Austen/pop-culture article). Therefore, merging would create confusion rather than clarity. One might want to repeat the Film and Television adaptations in this Austen-pop article, so that at least there's something in the P&P section here, with a link to the full P&P-depictions article; but no, merging would be very inadvisable in my opinion. Another alternative would to restyle the P&P-depictions article as only the literary depictions and sequels, moving all the screen versions to this Austen-pop article. Softlavender (talk) 11:18, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

RESOLVED: Due to lack of recent response, I went ahead and split and renamed the overlong P&P adaptations article, moving the theatre and screen versions to the Austen/pop article, and renaming the surviving literary adaptions article "List of literary adaptations of Pride and Prejudice". Softlavender (talk) 02:07, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

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Proposed Bibliography and References for Additions

Greetings. I was considering adding a "Music" section here in addition to the other areas of popular culture (film and media) listed that Austen is influencing.

A proposed bibliography is as follows:

Baker, William. Critical Companion to Jane Austen : A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. Facts on File, Inc, 2008. Facts on File Library of World Literature.

Brooks, Jeanice. “In Search of Austen’s ‘Missing Songs.’” The Review of English Studies, vol.  67, Issue 282, 1 November 2016, p. 914+.

SAĞLAM, Berkem. "Becoming Jane: The Romanticisation of Celebrity.”  Journal of Faculty of Letters, vol. 34, no. 1, June 2017, pp. 147-157. 

Sandock, Mollie. "'I Burn with Contempt for My Foes': Jane Austen's Music Collections and Women's Lives in Regency England." Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, vol. 23, 2001, pp. 105-117. 

Simons, Judy. "Jane Austen and Popular Culture." A Companion to Jane Austen, Claudia L. (ed.) Johnson and Clara (ed.) Tuite, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 467-477. 

Weber, Brenda R. "For the Love of Jane: Austen, Adaptation and Celebrity." Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities, Rachel (ed. and introd.) Carroll, Continuum, 2009, pp. 186-196. 

Wilson Kimber. "Jane Austen's Playlist: Teaching Music History beyond the Canon.” Journal of Music History Pedagogy, vol. 4, no. 2, Spring, pp. 213-230. 

Zionkowski, Linda, and Mimi Hart. "'Aunt Jane Began Her Day with Music': Austen and the Female Amateur." Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, vol. 37, 2015, p. 165+.

Proposed References:

"Jane Austen's Music Collection Made Available Online." 15 December 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-35112465 Retrieved 1 November 2017.

"The Jane Austen Argument" https://thejaneaustenargument.bandcamp.com/ Retrieved 31 October 2017.

Uatkins (talk) 03:07, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

• Whatever material that is gleaned from these sources seems to belong the Jane Austen article or the articles on the individual works (either Austen's or the particular adaptation), whichever the material refers to. Scholarship is not popular culture. Softlavender (talk) 23:07, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Removed long, chit-chatty, self-cited section

I've removed the following overlong, chitchatty, self-cited section from the article. Some element of it may possibly be appropriate for the article, but as self-cited primary-source material the section as a whole is not. Softlavender (talk) 22:12, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Scholarship on Jane Austen in Popular Culture

Listed below is recent research pertaining to the phenomena of Jane Austen fans and reception in popular culture:

Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (2012)--In this work, Claudia Johnson, Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University, grapples with the phenomena of Jane Austen’s global reception in both popular culture and academic culture. Johnson discusses this reception by dividing her book into four critical sections that categorizes Austen readership: Victorian era, World War I, World War II, and the establishment of the Austen house and museum. To name a few examples, Johnson studies how the soldiers in the trenches of France during the war received Austen’s books, how Jane Austen admirers spent money on an elaborate gravestone amidst the second world war, and how modern controversies continue to persist surrounding Jane Austen’s authentic images. Ultimately, Johnson argues that there is not one Jane Austen, each generation renews their love for her and re-imagines her world. Johnson says in her introduction, “I shall explore...how various ‘legends’--and the plural is important, for there is no single ‘Jane Austen’--came about, to ponder how Jane Austen became ‘Jane Austen,’ the deathlessly divine Austen, venerated with a peculiar intensity.” So in the course of the book, Johnson explores these legends of Jane Austen that inspire a type of “divine madness” in Jane Austen readers, a madness that finds no shame in dressing in Victorian dresses, attending conferences, and playing video games. Enriched with historical data and scholarship, Johnson’s book studies this madness through the lens of Austen’s materiality and historical stories from each historical time period. With this research, the author discusses the physical being of Austen and her home’s contents. And while many Jane Austen related books tend to focus on a link between all of Austen’s readers, Johnson argues for the unique reception of Austen in every century: from times of wars to times of peace, from modernity to postmodernity, from the empire of Britain to the empire of Hollywood. And though Claudia Johnson never claims to be a Janeite, she has a clear love and appreciation for her legacy: “Jane Austen is not and has never been any old great author, whom we might discuss more or less rationally, but a fabulous figure and the paragon of popular and elite audiences alike. Certainly, no other author--perhaps not even Shakespeare himself...has inspired such widespread and intense devotion that is itself worthy of study.”

Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives (2012)--In this edited collection, editors Gillman Down and Clare Hanson gathered together several articles that address the popular and global presence of Jane Austen’s literature. This anthology seeks to understand the modern readers’ insatiable appetite for Austen’s works and “serve[s] to remind us that in these competitive days for academic scholarship, there may be considerable advantages in working on such a popular canonical author.” In the following chapters, the authors address various topics. For example, in “A Genius for Fortelling: Augustan Austen and Future Fiction,” Deidre Lynch examines the periodical life of Austen in the eighteenth and twentieth century and how women like Virginia Woolf gained personal empowerment through Austen’s novels. In another article, Julian North (“Jane Austen’s Life on Page and Screen”) argues that Austen’s life and works have been re-conceptualized in popular culture, both in fan fiction and in movies, that produce a more romanticized version of Jane Austen, specifically examining a 1980s biography and three film adaptations: Mansfield Park (1999), Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane (2007), and Jeremy Lovering’s Miss Austen Regrets (2007). In Felicity James’ article “At Home with Jane: Placing Austen in Contemporary Culture” she asks the question “Where do we place Austen in contemporary culture?” In order to answer this question, James explores what she calls the pilgrimages of Austen which she defines as places where the author lived, both at her home and her English landscape. Transnational adaptations, Bride and Prejudice among many, take Jane Austen’s world and migrate it to another culture and region where fans (of all races, classes, and genders) are constantly writing themselves into the novels. Similar to James, Gillian Dow examines Jane Austen’s non-English reception, but instead of adaptations of the movies and fan fiction, the author examines translations of the novels and the particular challenges that arise due to Jane Austen’s unique style and syntax.

The Digital Afterlives of Jane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard (2014)--This work is by Kylie Mirmohamadi, a research associate in English and History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Similar to her predecessors, Mirmohamadi explores the digital presence of Jane Austen on a wide range of digital platforms, but more specifically, she argues against a static notion of Austen readership, disavowing a single interpretation of Austen’s fans because the genre and readership is always changing and evolving. This work sits at the intersection of several literary theories, including literary studies, Austen scholarship, film adaption, and history, which allows Mirmohamadi to expand the interpretation of Austen's page and screen presence. The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter one addresses Austen’s works and adaptations on Wattpad, an online community based in Canada that houses anything from Mormon-based stories and historical romance to paranormal activity and chick lit. In chapter two, Mirmohamadi argues that Wattpad’s platforms allow its users to read and re-read Austen into endlessly new forms and genres which is one of the reasons why Austen’s presence is so dominating and equally endless. Chapter three takes a closer look at the fan sites of the Republic of Pemberley and the Derbyshire Writers’ Guild and notes that these mediums evoke notions of the material and literary community which Mirmohamadi compares to the differences between a physical library (as a building) to an electronic library. And lastly, the final chapter explores the open-endedness of Austen’s place in the canon and how this canon has become immersed in the digital. Mirmohamadi ends her book with a conclusion titled “no conclusion.” In this section, Mirmohamadi’s point is that Austen’s fan fiction has no end; therefore, there will always be more to study. She says, “This book has been exploring the digital networks of Janeites, whose activities resist the very notion of the closure of their beloved canon, and who have created online worlds ‘without end’ with endlessly proliferating pixelated text and copied and pasted JPEG images.” In other words, for Mirmohamadi, scholarship will never be complete about Jane Austen because this eighteenth century author’s canon will never be complete.

Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (2011)--In short, Juliette Wells’ book tries to synthesize why and how twentieth century readers and scholars connect with Jane Austen’s legacy.  In the following chapters, Wells chooses a wide variety of examples that define the scope of Jane Austen fans, for example, Alberta H. Burke’s obsessive love and collector of anything Jane Austen and Oprah Winfrey’s influence on a wider readership for Austen. Wells engages this wide range of scholarship by noting that all of Jane Austen fans approach her works differently: some scholarly, some emotionally, some critically, and some imaginatively. In her fourth chapter, Wells explores the various books that have been inspired by the plethora amount of Jane Austen travel sites: Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, Jane Austen Centre in Bath, and Jane Austen’s grave at Winshetser Cathedral. Wells argues that these books about places are not merely a travel log but an experience of emotions and the senses. Continuing past the figure of Jane Austen herself, the author writes about the fan fiction that focuses on adding sexual scenes, faith-based themes, and paranormal activity. Wells argues that these types of fan fiction are less conventional since many devotees of Jane Austen would reject these works. In the last pages of her work, Wells delves into several societies devoted to the work and life of Jane Austen, focusing primarily on JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America). Wells’ discussion of JASNA brings up the controversy of bridging the gap between amateur readers of Austen and academic scholars of Austen, but even though this controversy will persist, Well points out that this society provides accessible material and resources for both the general public and academic scholars in a public space.

References

Adding More Webseries Adaptations

I've noticed that five webseries adaptations are currently listed under various books (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries for Pride and Prejudice, From Mansfield With Love for Mansfield Park, Emma Approved for Emma, The Cate Morland Chronicles [misspelled] for Northanger Abbey, and Welcome to Sandition for Sanditon, which otherwise has no adaptations). Many of these series are incorrectly cited, probably because they aren't well-known enough to have much third-party content written about them. That being said, I personally believe that webseries adaptations are a valuable addition to this page and should perhaps even have their own section (I don't know if it makes sense to have them in film and television or not—I need someone with a more informed opinion to give feedback).

List of additional complete Jane Austen webseries that I know of:

Sense and Sensibility Elinor and Marianne Take Barton (2015) Project Dashwood (2015)

Emma The Emma Agenda (2017), an adaptation in which Knightly is a woman (Jordan) and Jane Fairfax is a man (Jon).

Northanger Abbey Northbound (2015)

Adapting characters and plotlines from all six books The Jane Games (2015)—one female character from each novel is competing in a reality TV show. Male love interests and a few other characters also appear. Jane Austen is the host/narrator.

Webseries in which Jane Austen appears as a character The Writing Majors (2014) —Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Emily Dickinson are college roommates. Other authors also appear. References to Austen's works and some direct quotes. Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party (2017)—definitely the least significant on this list, as Jane Austen barely appears, but she is a character.

I'm going to look for proper citations for all of these, which I will put here if and when I come across them. ZoJazW (talk) 30 June 2018 —Preceding undated comment added 22:40, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Parentheticals

TonyPS214, parenthetical comments are unencyclopedic and should be avoided. Please remove the parentheses (brackets) and rephrase without them. Softlavender (talk) 20:13, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

(if it's not too much trouble). Martinevans123 (talk) 20:28, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

• TonyPS214, please keep all discussions of content on the talkpage of this article rather than on usertalk pages. Wikipedia operates by WP:CONSENSUS, and right now the consensus (from three very experienced Wikipedia editors) is to avoid parentheticals and to provide year dates of films and TV/radio programs. Currently you are edit-warring against consensus, and if you continue, you will be reported to a noticeboard and likely blocked from editing. Therefore, your best course of action, as always with Wikipedia, is to discuss civilly on articletalk, not usertalk. Softlavender (talk) 17:26, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Softlavender, I always make every attempt to be civil in dealing with disputes over editing, However I have seen no condemnation on your part of Gareth Griffith-Jones's extremely offensive personal attack. If you agree that his comments were extremely out-of-line and extremely offensive, then you also should report it to Wikipedia. TonyPS214 18:01, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

"I stumble and nearly step in a pile of horseshit." Martinevans123 (talk) 13:40, 7 February 2019 (UTC)