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Emma Adapted

Jane Austen’s Heroine from Book to Film

by Marc DiPaolo (Author)
©2007 Monographs XII, 190 Pages

Summary

This work of literary and film criticism examines all eight filmed adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma produced between 1948 and 1996 as vastly different interpretations of the source novel. Instead of condemning the movies and television specials as being «not as good as the book,» Marc DiPaolo considers how each adaptation might be understood as a valid «reading» of Austen’s text. For example, he demonstrates how the Gwyneth Paltrow film Emma is both a romance and a female coming-of-age story, the 1972 BBC miniseries dramatizes Emma’s world as claustrophobic and Emma herself as suffering from depression, and the modern-day teen comedy Clueless comes closest of all to bringing a feminist reading of the novel to the screen. Each version illuminates a different, legitimate way of reading the novel that is rewarding for Austen fans, scholars, and students alike.

Details

Pages
XII, 190
Publication Year
2007
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433100000
Language
English
Keywords
Austen, Jane Cultural study Emma Film Geschichte 1948-1996 Literature Regency Period Cinema Comedy British Romanticism
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2007. XII, 190 pp.

Biographical notes

Marc DiPaolo (Author)

The Author: Marc DiPaolo, Assistant Professor of Communications and English at Alvernia College, is a narratologist and specialist in British and American Romanticism. He is an editor of the literature anthology The Conscious Reader, and has contributed chapters to the forthcoming books A Century of the Marx Brothers and The Amazing Transforming Superhero. He earned his doctorate in English from Drew University.

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Title: Emma Adapted