Full Description
Lynne Tatlock examines the transmission, diffusion, and literary survival of Jane Eyre in the German-speaking territories and the significance and effects thereof, 1848-1918. Engaging with scholarship on the romance novel, she presents an historical case study of the generative power and protean nature of Brontë's new romance narrative in German translation, adaptation, and imitation as it involved multiple agents, from writers and playwrights to readers, publishers, illustrators, reviewers, editors, adaptors, and translators.
Jane Eyre in German Lands traces the ramifications in the paths of transfer that testify to widespread creative investment in romance as new ideas of women's freedom and equality topped the horizon and sought a home, especially in the middle classes. As Tatlock outlines, the multiple German instantiations of Brontë's novel—four translations, three abridgments, three adaptations for general readers, nine adaptations for younger readers, plays, farces, and particularly the fiction of the popular German writer E. Marlitt and its many adaptations—evince a struggle over its meaning and promise. Yet precisely this multiplicity (repetition, redundancy, and proliferation) combined with the romance narrative's intrinsic appeal in the decades between the March Revolutions and women's franchise enabled the cultural diffusion, impact, and long-term survival of Jane Eyre as German reading.
Though its focus on the circulation of texts across linguistic boundaries and intertwined literary markets and reading cultures, Jane Eyre in German Lands unsettles the national paradigm of literary history and makes a case for a fuller and inclusive account of the German literary field.
Contents
Preface
1. Jane Eyre-Effects: The Survival and Diffusion of Romance
2. Looking for Sympathy and Intelligibility
3. "Upended Priority": The Orphan on Stage
4. The "Erotics of Talk"
5. Anger and Sadness: Unsanctioned Emotion, Articulate Feeling
6. Goldelse (1866): "A Lighter-Tinted Jane Eyre in Somewhat Different Circumstances"
7. Mixed Messages: Marlitt's Little Moorland Princess (1871)
8. The Purchase of Romance: The One and the Many
Coda "Relations stop nowhere": The Purchase of Romance in a Time of Inequality
Notes
Bibliography
German Editions and Adaptations of Jane Eyre
Editions, Adaptations, and Spoofs of Charlotte-Birch Pfeiffer Die Waise aus Lowood
Editions and Adaptations of the Fiction of E. Marlitt
Works Cited
