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.
Individual Entries
Percy the Bad Chick (p. 177 Gemma Hardy)
This book that Nell was reading was part of a series called Old Lob, stories of a kindly farmer with a large range of livestock including Percy, whose adventures helped children to read in Primary School. Introduced in the Forties, it mimicked what I experienced in grade school when introduced to the Dick and Jane books with their dog Spot. Other Old Lob characters included Master Willy the pig, Mr. Grumps the goat, Miss Tibbs the cat, and Mrs. Cuddy the cow.
(archive.spectator.co.uk/article/19th-december-1981/34/old-lobs-hour)
A Bottle of Ribena (p. 48 Gemma Hardy)
Ribena was a British-origin brand of blackcurrant-based fruit drink concentrate used to produce carbonated and uncarbonated soft drinks.. It was produced by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) until 2013, when the brand was sold to Suntory.
The brand had a strong reputation as a healthy product for children, stemming from its distribution to children as a vitamin C supplement during World War II by the British government. Beecham (a company that has been part of GSK since 2000) bought the brand in 1955 and developed many soft drink versions. A series of scandals in the 2000s, concerning vitamin C levels...
moreThe Scottish Gaelic name for Oban translates to "the little bay," which is attributed to the bay in Oban that resembles a horseshoe. The town is known as the "seafood capital of Scotland," and it became an important base for the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII, and it became a landing point for the first Tranatlantic Telephone Cable during the Cold War. This provided a hotline between the president of the United States and the present of the USSR, during that time. This town is where Mr. Donaldson's sister Isobel lives in Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy. Mr. Donaldson recommends that if things were to go awry with her stay at Claypoole, she can go to this town, where his sister lives.
Bibliography
Livesey, Margot. The Flight of Gemma Hardy. HarperCollins, 2012.
Information Source: "12 Amazing Facts About Oban, Scotland." bonawehouse.co.uk. Bonawe House. 19 Dec. 2018. Web. Date...
moreWhile it is easy to see the connection that birds bring to The Flight of Gemma Hardy in regards to Jane Eyre, the bird that is first mentioned by Gemma could be a hint to her Icelandic heritage. "I stepped over to the bookcase and pulled down one of my favourite books: Birds of the World. Each page showed a bird in its natural habitat—a puffin with its fat, gaudy beak, peering out of a burrow, a lyre-bird spreading its tail beneath a huge leafy tree—accompanied by a description." Puffins are specifically located in northern oceans. The Atlantic Puffin is found off the coasts of "northern Europe, northern France up to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Atlantic Canada. More than 90% of the global population is found in Europe (4,770,000–5,780,000 pairs, equaling 9,550,000–11,600,000 adults) and colonies in Iceland alone are home to 60% of the world's Atlantic puffins" (Wikipedia).
Puffins actually are a tourist...
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River Teviot (p. 118)
River Teviot is a tributary of the River Tweed in southern Scotland. The river, rich in trout, flows northeast past Hawick to join the Tweed at Kelso. The surrounding river basin consists of steep rounded hills and is used primarily for sheep grazing. (brittanica.com)
Skara Brae (p.196)
Skara Brae is a Neolithic settlement located on the largest island of the Orkney archipelago. It consists of the remains of eight clustered houses occupied from 3180 BC to about 2500 BC. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids. It has been called the “Scottish Pompeii” because of its excellent preservation. A severe storm in 1850 hit Scotland and stripped away the soil to uncover the village. (en.m.wikipedia.org).
Scapa Flow (p. 170)
This is a body of water in the Orkney Islands that has played an important role in travel, trade, and conflict throughout time. The Vikings anchored their longships there more than 1000 years ago. It served an important British naval base in both world wars. In World War I, the Germans scuttled their fleet there and as a result, its wrecks and marine habitats have formed an acclaimed diving location. The world’s first ship-to-ship transfer of liquefied natural gas took place at Scapa Flow in 2007. (en.m.wikipedia.org).
Blackbird Hall is located on Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland. Orkney was a very special place not only in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, being the home of Mr. Sinclair, but in the lore of Scotland as a nation. Orkney is supposedly the home of such literary giants as Sir Gareth, Sir Gaheris, Sir Gawaine, and Sir Agravain in the Arthurian Legends. Orkney is specifically important in the 1960s-1980s, because of the potitential for uranuim mines, which were never formed, helping to keep the islands as natural and Gothic as always.
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