Austen, Creative Responses

Paula Morris’s ‘Premises’ relocates Austen’s plotlines in the modern-day content of movie moguls.  The text seems to imply both that Austen’s novels are all variations of a single theme; and that each of Austen’s plotlines is unsuitable as the basis of a film script.  How does the story draw on themes and concerns found in Austen’s texts?  

Kipling’s ‘The Janeites’ responds in a very different way to Austen’s works.  It seems to me to function on several different levels –for example, as a tribute to values found in Austen’s texts; and as a paean to the common man.  What is the significance of the two contexts in the text – that is of the Western Front during WW1, and a Masonic hall?  What does Kipling’s choice of protagonist  suggest?

Lost in Austen  has been described as ‘enormously good-natured fun’ with ‘a distinct whiff of commercial calculation’ (James Walton, Telegraph, 4 September 2008), ‘a parody of a pastiche of a mockery of a sham’ (Giles Coren, The Times, 26 November 2008) and ‘a rich intertextual document’ which comments on ‘love, kindness, trust, female friendship, feminine desire, and personal and social anxiety’ (Louise Kaplan, ‘Completely without sense’, Persuasions On-line, 30 (20) (2010). I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I’m not sure how far it can be said to ‘work’ as a transformation of Austen.  Is it just ‘good-natured fun?  Or do you, like Kaplan, believe it merits consideration for its intertextuality?