A Breath of Fresh Eyre

Book excerpt: Ever since its publication in 1847 Jane Eyre – one of the most popular English novels of all time – has fascinated scholars and a wide reading public alike and has proved a source of inspiration to successive generations of creative writers and artists. There is hardly any other hypotext that has been re-worked in so many adaptations for stage and screen, has inspired so many painters and musicians, and has been so often imitated, re-written, parodied or extended by prequels and sequels. New versions in turn refer to and revise older rewritings or take up suggestions from Brontë scholarship, creating a dense intertextual web. The essays collected in this volume do justice to the variety of media involved in the Jane Eyre reworkings, by covering narrative, visual and stage adaptations, including an adaptor’s perspective. Contributions review a diverse range of works, from postcolonial revision to postmodern fantasy, from imaginary after-lives to science fiction, from plays and Hollywood movies to opera, from lithographs and illustrated editions to comics and graphic novels. The volume thus offers a comprehensive collection of reworkings that also takes into account recent novels, plays and works of art that were published after Patsy Stoneman’s seminal 1996 study on Brontë Transformations.