The eternal Eyre: the fictional world and the world of fiction in Jane Eyre and its adaptations

Abstract

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) continues to find appreciative audience throughout every decade. Jane Eyre has inspired numerous prequels, sequels, revisions, re-tellings, adaptations, and spin offs. The creation and acceptability of other art forms and merchandising based on the novel underlines its undiminished popularity. The thesis will reflect on the influence and significance of Jane Eyre and its adaptations in academic circles and contemporary culture. It analyses the fictional worlds in select fiction and film adaptations of Jane Eyre in the light of the existing post-colonial and feminist scholarship on Jane Eyre, in order to expand the existing scholarship on its adaptations. It looks for recurring trends centred on race and gender, the generic fluidity of the novel that facilitates the creation of newer adaptations in varying genres and natures, the pattern of adaptation of the novel into visual media, and the prominence of Jane Eyre in contemporary popular culture. Nineteen novels and ten films based on the novel are selected for the study. The thesis discusses the numerous genre transformations the novel has undergone and offers insights into alternate perspectives on Brontë’s novel based on its selected adaptations. The actual world of text production and the possible worlds manifested by the different authors shall serve to be the focus of analysis. With its engagement on the film adaptations, the thesis is designed to provide a context for debates centered on the pleasures of popular fiction in all their ambivalence, tension, and contradiction. Drawing on contemporary critical theory, it will investigate production contexts, genres in their historical diversity and fluid boundaries, texts and the formation of identities or subjectivities, readerships and the historical conditions which shape the production and reproduction of re-readings. The study engages the novel’s generic transformations, shifts in perspectives, visual media adaptations, and its significance popular culture to foreground its ever-increasing popularity and longevity.