Transmedia Storytelling: Pemberley Digital’s Adaptations of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley
This volume charts the evolution of Pemberley Digital’s transmedia adaptations of nineteenth-century novels in order to interrogate the uneasy relationship between transmedia storytelling and consumer culture. It first examines two Austen-centered films, Lost in Austen and Austenland, that present “immersive” Austen experiences that anticipate Pemberley Digital’s transmedia adaptations, bridging traditional film adaptations and transmedia’s participatory culture. Subsequent chapters turn to Pemberley Digital’s transmedia adaptations of Austen’s and Shelley’s novels to argue that, although such adaptations may appear feminist in their emphasis on female protagonists, their larger narratives expose a subtext of anxiety about unstable gender roles, financial vulnerability, and the undervaluation of career-specific skill sets, both for the characters and the production company itself. The study provides a robust theoretical framework within which to read transmedia adaptations of “classic literature,” illuminating both the potential of, and the challenges facing, digital and transmedia storytellers and participants.
Jennifer Camden is Professor and Associate Chair of the English Department at University of Indianapolis, USA and Associate Director of the Strain Honors College. She has authored articles on nineteenth-century British and American literature, and her book, Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels, was published in 2010.
Kate Faber Oestreich is Associate Professor of Literature, Writing, and New Media at Coastal Carolina University, USA. Her research focuses on English literature of the long nineteenth century; digital storytelling and adaptation; and critical theory, especially those concerned with new media, feminism, cultural materialism, and sartorial semiotics. She has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, The CEA Critic, and the edited collection Straight Writ Queer: Non-normative Expressions of Heterosexual Desire in Literature.
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