Rezensionen 165 Raimund Borgmeier, der darauf hinweist, dass der englische Garten zu unrecht in vielen Darstellungen der Romantik unberücksichtigt bleibt. Insgesamt nehmen die Beiträge dieses Bandes aus einer Fülle unterschiedlicher Perspektiven Stellung zu Texten und Problemen der britischen und europäischen Romantik. Wenn auch in der Einleitung keine genauere Definition der einzelnen “Romantiken” gegeben wird, auf die der Titel des Buches anspielt, machen die Artikel die nationale und internationale Heterogenität der Literatur - und zum Teil auch der Kunst - der Epoche der Romantik aus verschiedenen Hinsichten deutlich. Dabei werden immer wieder die Vernetzung der einzelnen Literaturen im gesamteuropäischen Kontext und das wechselseitige Geben und Nehmen und die Anverwandlungen und Transformationen des Fremden erörtert. Nach der Lektüre des Bandes wird der in einer wissenschaftlichen Publikation eher seltene euphorische Ton, in dem die Einleitung geschrieben ist, verständlich. Eine kleine Bemerkung sei am Schluss noch gestattet. Die Artikel sind alle in englischer Sprache verfasst. Nur werden mehrfach Zitate aus deutschen Werken im Haupttext in englischer Übersetzung angeführt und in Fußnoten in der Originalsprache wiedergegeben. Lessenich verzichtet in seinen Büchner-Zitaten sogar gänzlich auf den Wortlaut des Originals, so dass es so aussieht, als habe Büchner englisch geschrieben. Ein solches Vorgehen sollten Philologen vermeiden, vor allem in einem Band, in dem so viel an gediegener und innovativer Forschungsarbeit geleistet wird. Wolfgang G. Müller Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena Margarete Rubik, Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (eds.), A Breath of Fresh Eyre. Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 111). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007. Thomas Kullmann Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) stands out among nineteenth-century British novels for its amazing capacity of raising controversies on issues which at the beginning of the 21 st century are still considered as central: gender, class, colonialism. The status of this classic in literary scholarship and academic instruction as well as its popularity with “a wider reading public” (10) are unchallenged. It is not surprising that Jane Eyre has engendered a considerable number of “intertextual and intermedial reworkings” (as indicated by the book’s subtitle), adaptations, films, theatrical and operatic versions as well as novels, plays and pictorial artefacts which in some way engage in a dialogue with Brontë’s novel and her heroine. AAA Band 34 (2009), Heft 1 Rezensionen 166 These ‘spin-offs’ are the subject-matter of the present volume. A survey of the various and seemingly contradictory kinds of Jane Eyre reception is provided by Barbara Schaff (“The Strange After-Lives of Jane Eyre”, 25-36). Three articles are concerned with the best-known of Jane Eyre reworkings, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which has itself achieved classical status. Wolfgang G. Müller (“The Intertextual Status of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: Dependence on a Victorian Classic and Independence as a Post-Colonial Novel”, 63-79) provides a comprehensive and commonsensical analysis of the relationship of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, concluding that being both derivative and independent Rhys’s novel is a “stunning literary achievement” (77). Bárbara Arizti (“The Future That Has Happened: Narrative Freedom and Déjà Lu in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea”, 39-48) examines this book from the point of view of “ethical criticism” (39), focusing on the hypothetical “side events” (44) referred to in the novel, which unmask “the fallacy of a onedimensional reality” (47). Thomas Loe compares “Landscape and Character in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea” (49-61). Loe convincingly notes that in both novels the characters’ “perceptions of landscape [...] give us insight into their innermost cognitive processes that are crucial to their identity and their own understanding of their senses of self” (50) and that details of Jane’s landscape “form an anthropomorphic objective correlative to her own disoriented state” (58) while landscapes in Wide Sargasso Sea are filtered through “Antoinette’s meandering mind” (58). On the whole, however, Loe’s remarks on landscape and character are rather vague; the narrative processes which give meaning to landscapes in the two novels could certainly be analysed in greater detail. Next to Wide Sargasso Sea, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001) is obviously the most original and successful of Jane Eyre spin-offs. Margarete Rubik provides an introduction to this postmodern novel which connects the motifs of detective fiction, time travel and “transfictional migration”: 20 th -century characters enter the fictional space of Brontë’s novel in order to rewrite it, bringing about the union of Jane and Rochester rather than the supposedly ‘original’ marriage of Jane and St. John Rivers (“Invasions into Literary Texts, Re-plotting and Transfictional Migration in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, 167-179). As Rubik notes, Fforde’s novel is “both a satirical deflation of the model and a supreme tribute to its continuing appeal and fascination” (178). Mark Berninger and Katrin Thomas also engage with this book, focusing on its stategies of “reification”, i.e. rendering concrete abstract and metaphorical concepts such as the interaction between text and reader (“A Parallelquel of a Classic Text and Reification of the Fictional - the Playful Parody of Jane Eyre in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair”, 181-196). Juliette Wells draws attention to the fact that Fforde’s 20 th century heroine, Thursday Next, shares many character features with Brontë’s Jane, whose role in The Eyre Affair is surprisingly marginal (“An Eyre-Less Affair? Jasper Fforde’s Seeming Elision of Jane”, 197-208). Jürgen Wehrmann compares Fforde’s book to two other Science Fiction versions of Jane Eyre material (“Jane Eyre in Outer Space: Victorian Motifs in Post-Feminist Science Fiction”, 149-165): Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor (1986) and David Weber’s Honor Harington cycle (1993-), their common denominator being their “post-feminist point of view” (163), according to which “similar difficulties may occur in patriarchal societies and in those significantly changed by a feminist revolution” (178). Rezensionen 167 D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte (2000) is a novel about sex and colonialism as well as feminism and literary criticism, thus taking up central issues of the reception of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea as well as Shakespeare’s Tempest. Sue Thomas (“Pathologies of Sexuality, Empire and Slavery: D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte”, 101-114) records her resistance to this book with its “detritus of plantation pornography, the racism inherent in its conventions, and domestic sexual exploitation, all paraded before readers with a tasteless and breathless exhibitionism” (112). Proceeding from “possible worlds theory” (82-85) Ines Detmers compares Charlotte to two other Jane Eyre sequels (“‘The Second Mrs. Rochesters’: Telling Untold Stories of Jane Eyre’s (Im-)Possible Married Lives”, 81-99): Hilary Bailey’s Mrs. Rochester: A Sequel to Jane Eyre (1997) and Kimberley A. Bennett’s Jane Rochester: A Novel Inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (2002). As Detmers points out, all three novels envisage the female protagonist undergoing “various emancipatory ‘metamorphoses’” (97) which may allow her to live happily ever after but go way beyond anything Brontë herself could have had in mind. Maggie Tonkin discusses Mardi McConnochie’s Coldwater (2001), which transfers parts of the Jane Eyre plot, and of the Brontë family history, to a penal colony off the Australian coast (“Brontë Badland: Jane Eyre reconfigured as Colonial Gothic in Mardi McConnochie’s Coldwater”, 115-127). As Tonkin shows, this novel in figuring Bertha Mason as a “polyvalent metaphor [...] brings forth into melodramatic fulfilment all that is repressed in colonial history, and occluded in the text of Jane Eyre” (126). Ursula Kluwick provides a comparative analysis of four novels which, like Jane Eyre, are preoccupied with “female confinement and anger” (130): “Jane’s Angry Daughters: Anger in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” (129-148). Kluwick concludes that while the heroines of Brookner’s, Drabble’s and Mukherjee’s novels “fail to engage with their anger productively”, Kincaid’s Lucy “is the only one to seize her anger and turn it into a productive force which she can direct against the confining claim of others in order to gain independence” (147). Verena-Susanna Nungesser investigates the parallels between Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938): In both novels young women find themselves in a “haunted (prison-like) mansion” (212) and are confronted with a beloved man’s dark secret, the disclosure of which leads to the heroine’s maturation (“From Thornfield Hall to Manderley and Beyond: Jane Eyre and Rebecca as Transformations of the Fairy Tale, the Novel of Development, and the Gothic Novel”, 209-226). Both novels, Nungesser contends, make use of fairy-tale and Gothic motifs “to portray the anxieties of female development and female authorship” (224). Two contributions are devoted to film versions of Jane Eyre. Sarah Wotton’s focus is on the character of Rochester (“‘Picturing in me a hero of romance’: The Legacy of Jane Eyre’s Byronic Hero”, 229-241) while Carol M. Dole investigates “Children in the Jane Eyre Films” (243-257). After discussing the Byronic traits of Brontë’s Rochester, Wotton proceeds to discuss the treatment of Byronic motifs in the 1983 BBC and 1997 ITV versions. While Timothy Dalton’s 1983 Rochester can certainly be considered flamboyantly Byronic (233f.) Ciarán Hinds’ 1997 Rochester stresses the brutal side of Brontë’s hero, in a version which “neither endorses nor glamorises male supremacy” (239). Dole’s contribution on the roles of children (little Jane, Helen, Adèle) in five film versions (of 1934, 1944, 1970, 1996 and 1997) is a Rezensionen 168 fascinating study of the changing cultural concepts of childhood and female development. All of the films, however, emphasize “Jane’s suffering rather than her learning” (247), privileging certain aspects of the novel at the expense of others. Marla Harris investigates the phenomenon of Jane Eyre adaptations for young readers (“Reader, She Married Him: Abridging and Adapting Jane Eyre for Children and Young Adults”, 259-271), looking at “illustrated prose adaptations” (262f.), “comic book adaptations” (263f.) and “graphic novel adaptations” (265). These adaptations affirm Jane Eyre’s status as a classic but, as they involve substantial abridgements, they “threaten, ironically, to strip it of the very qualities that made it a classic in the first place” (270). Norbert Bachleitner takes a close look at three of these Jane Eyre comics (“Jane Eyre for Young Readers: Three Illustrated Adaptations”, 273-286), of 1947, 1962 and 2003. While the 1947 Jane may “remind us of a cover girl”, the 1962 Jane “has become a respectable person who never loses her self-control” (281). The 2003 version, published for pedagogical purposes, is similar to the 1962 one in that “action and body language are [...] reduced to the bare minimum” (283). Originally, Jane Eyre was published without illustrations, but illustrated editions appeared from 1872 onwards. These are the subject of Michaela Braesel’s contribution (“Jane Eyre Illustrated”, 287-296). As Braesel demonstrates, “the illustrations always serve as an addition, as a complement to the text, which does not really need such visualisation, owing to Brontë’s detailed descriptions” (295). Visualisation takes on a most fascinating form in a series of lithographs produced in 2001/ 02, discussed by Aline Ferreira (“Paula Rego’s Visual Adaptations of Jane Eyre”, 297-313). One of the pictures, called “Loving Bewick”, “consists of a powerfully sensual scene depicting Jane receiving the kiss of a pelican” (300); like the other lithographs, it can certainly be considered a significant interpretive comment on Brontë’s novel. Two papers are devoted to Michael Berkeley’s opera Jane Eyre (2000), to which David Malouf contributed the libretto. Walter Bernhart explores the “mythic” aspects of Jane Eyre, which he argues allowed Malouf and Berkeley to create a successful opera which “uses the immediacy of music to evoke an awareness of basic conditions of existence in archetypal terms” (“Myth-making Opera: David Malouf and Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre”, 317-329; 327). Bruno Lessard focuses on “questions of female subjectivity and madness” (“The Madwoman in the Classic: Intermediality, Female Subjectivity, and Dance in Michael Berkeley’s Jane Eyre”, 331-346; 331). As he points out, Berkeley’s opera can be placed in a tradition of operatic treatment of female insanity, which includes Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Strauss’s Salome. Jane-Eyre-inspired stage-plays by contemporary playwright Polly Teale are the subject of two further contributions. Kathleen Starck discusses Jane Eyre (1998), in which Jane and Bertha appear as two sides of the same person, “hot passion” and “cool rationality” (“‘From a Land of Hot Rain and Hurricanes’- Polly Teale’s Stage Adaptation of Jane Eyre”, 363-374; 372). Jarmila Mildorf’s paper is about After Mrs. Rochester (2003), a play about the life and personality of Jean Rhys (“Mad Intertextuality: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, After Mrs Rochester”, 347-.362), in which the motif of madness forms the starting-point for a number of intertextual references. Elke Mettinger-Schartmann conducts the reader into the (to most of us) unfamiliar area of Victorian melodrama (“John Brougham’s Stage Adaptation of Jane Rezensionen 169 Eyre - a Marxist Reading of Brontë’s Novel? ”, 375-390). While Jane Eyre: a Drama, in Five Acts (written in 1849 and performed in 1856), a play which emphasizes the issue of the class barrier, can hardly be considered a faithful rendering of Brontë’s novel, it provides a fascinating insight into 19 th -century working-class and lowermiddle-class culture. Rainer Emig examines echoes of Jane Eyre found in a piece of contemporary shock theatre (“Blasting Jane: Jane Eyre as an Intertext of Sarah Kane’s Blasted”, 391-404). In spite of these echoes opinions may be divided on whether Kane’s shop of horrors can really be considered “a breath of fresh Eyre” (as promised by the volume’s title). In the final chapter, playwright Michelene Wandor writes about her experiences of adapting Jane Eyre for a radio broadcast in 1994 (“Reader: Who Wrote You? An Autocritical Exercise upon Jane Eyre”, 407-411). The volume presents its readers with a very rich survey of the stupendous and multifaceted afterlife of a literary classic. In view of the ideological warfare Jane Eyre has given rise to, it is particularly gratifying to note that all of the articles collected are factual and informative and avoid partisanship. It is only rarely that the discourse of political correctness interferes with scholarly objectivity: We read that “in her pamphlet ‘Some Reflections on Marriage’ (1700) Mary Astell unashamedly stated: ‘They who marry for love, [...] find time enough to repent of their rash folly [...]’” (81). Why should Mary Astell have been ‘ashamed’ to state this view? When in another arcticle Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy turns out to be more politically-correct than novels by Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble and Bharati Mukherjee (see 147) one wonders if Lucy isn’t also the most predictable and least interesting of the four novels discussed. On the whole, however, readers will notice that the reception of Jane Eyre is certainly concerned with the areas of ‘gender and power’ and ‘colonialism’ but is by no means confined to these issues. In this respect, literary scholars will find the sections on Jane Eyre reworkings in genres and media other than the novel particularly rewarding. It is amazing in which ways these intermedial ‘spin-offs’ can add to our understanding of the original work; and it is certainly remarkable that all of the articles on Jane Eyre reworkings have something to say on the interpretation of Jane Eyre itself. Thomas Kullmann Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Osnabrück