Screening the Author

Abstract

This new series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.

Muse, Sister, Myth: The Cultural Afterlives of Emily Brontë on Screen

“…24 As I have previously noted, Wainwright's approach of narrowing down the focus on the lives of the Brontë sisters to revolve around the demise of Branwell, their brother, has been explained by her as the need to de-romanticize their creative works, and their authorial identities, and show the economic necessity that drove them to write. 25 In her own words, she saw their creative literary output as 'partly fuelled by desperation', in economic terms. 26 This is obviously a less mythologized approach to Emily Brontë, in comparison to the previous incarnations of her as a medium-author traversing a spiritual realm of creativity that is above mundane and earthly concerns.…”

“…As I have argued, 'what this all points us to is a new, more contemporary way of approaching the author's role and status within culture', envisioned through the body of Emily Brontë, 'that demands contradiction and plurality' rather than a unified public image. 28 This is created by Wainwright in several scenes where she represents creativity and authority through a communion of minds, and places Emily Brontë in the logic of shared ideas and inspiration, away from her previous solitary cloaked figure of romanticized individual genius. One of these scenes is described by Jessica Jernigan as a 'dreamlike sequence' where the four Brontë children -Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell -are shown with 'haloes of fire' around their heads, running in an 'empty ballroom where they play with toy soldiers come to life.…”