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Expanding Austenland: The Pride and Prejudice Fanfiction Archive explores Jane Austen's reception in popular culture through an exploration of the ever-expanding terrain of online fanfiction, professionally published (profic) texts, and other intertextual reworkings inspired by the author's most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. The book argues that given its pervasiveness, Pride and Prejudice could be usefully considered not as a single novel, but as an entire 'archive' of interrelated texts, or as a portal that opens a 'virtual world' for readers to expand and explore. By examining the Pride and Prejudice archive of interrelated texts, this book analyses the process through which an individual novel can develop a virtual life, or afterlife. The evolving world that is opened by Pride and Prejudice, and extended and enriched through fanfiction, is conceptualised in the monograph as 'Austenland'.
List of contents
Chapter 1 'She stimulates us to supply what is not there': Expanding Austen's world through fanfiction.- Chapter 2 'Light and bright and sparkling' - Pride and Prejudice and fairy tales.- Chapter 3 'You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you' - Darcymania takes over.- Chapter 4 'An arrival in Austenland': The virtual world of Pride and Prejudice.- Chapter 5 'Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?' - Zombies and vampires invade Pride and Prejudice.- Chapter 6 'How differently did everything now appear' - The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and transmedia storytelling.- Chapter 7 'There's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place': Pride and Prejudice and the pandemic.
About the author
Áine Madden is the senior programme and communications manager at the Digital Repository of Ireland. She holds a PhD and an MPhil in Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin.
Summary
Expanding Austenland: The Pride and Prejudice Fanfiction Archive explores Jane Austen’s reception in popular culture through an exploration of the ever-expanding terrain of online fanfiction, professionally published (profic) texts, and other intertextual reworkings inspired by the author’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. The book argues that given its pervasiveness, Pride and Prejudice could be usefully considered not as a single novel, but as an entire ‘archive’ of interrelated texts, or as a portal that opens a ‘virtual world’ for readers to expand and explore. By examining the Pride and Prejudice archive of interrelated texts, this book analyses the process through which an individual novel can develop a virtual life, or afterlife. The evolving world that is opened by Pride and Prejudice, and extended and enriched through fanfiction, is conceptualised in the monograph as ‘Austenland’.
