Deconstructing Austen Cybertexts: How Pride and Prejudice became The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (hereafter referred to as LBD) debuted on YouTube in April 2012 with a video featuring a twenty - four - year - old Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bennet speaking directly to the camera (‘My Name is Lizzie Bennet - Ep. 1’, 2012). That video marked the beginning of Lizzie’s year - long story, which re - imagined and re - worked Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice , by distributing the narrative across multiple media platforms. Originally released as a serial narrative from April 2012 to March 2013, Lizzie’s story started with that first YouTube video before expanding to include four additional video channels (belonging to some of the narrative’s secondary characters), thirteen interconnected Twitter feeds, several Tumblr blogs, Facebook profiles, and numerous interactions betwe en characters on various social media networks. Initially developed for its Internet audience by Hank Green and Bernie Su, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries narrative as a whole was a collaborative effort by a team of writers and editors. Margaret Dunlap, Rachel K iley, Kate Rorick, and Anne Toole joined Su in scripting the YouTube videos, while Jay Bushman and Alexandra Edwards managed and edited LBD’s various social media accounts (‘Team’, 2017). In 2013, the LBD production team won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outs tanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media - Original Interactive Programme (‘65th Emmy Awards Nominees and Winners’)

Deconstructing Austen Cybertexts: How Pride and Prejudice became The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (hereafter referred to as LBD) debuted on YouTube in April 2012 with a video featuring a twenty - four - year - old Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bennet speaking directly to the camera (‘My Name is Lizzie Bennet - Ep. 1’, 2012). That video marked the beginning of Lizzie’s year - long story, which re - imagined and re - worked Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice , by distributing the narrative across multiple media platforms. Originally released as a serial narrative from April 2012 to March 2013, Lizzie’s story started with that first YouTube video before expanding to include four additional video channels (belonging to some of the narrative’s secondary characters), thirteen interconnected Twitter feeds, several Tumblr blogs, Facebook profiles, and numerous interactions betwe en characters on various social media networks. Initially developed for its Internet audience by Hank Green and Bernie Su, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries narrative as a whole was a collaborative effort by a team of writers and editors. Margaret Dunlap, Rachel K iley, Kate Rorick, and Anne Toole joined Su in scripting the YouTube videos, while Jay Bushman and Alexandra Edwards managed and edited LBD’s various social media accounts (‘Team’, 2017). In 2013, the LBD production team won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outs tanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media - Original Interactive Programme (‘65th Emmy Awards Nominees and Winners’)

Loudly Lydia: a look at the modern Lydia Bennet in “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries,” and what she implies about Austen in contemporary social debates

Pride and Prejudice has captivated audiences for nearly two centuries and its adaptations have given insight to Austen's social commentary in each generation. When The Lizzie Bennet Diaries premiered in 2012, the Bennet sisters were introduced to a new minefield – the 21st century. Using transmedia to relate with a young and eager-to-engage audience, the series modernizes the plots and characters to better relate viewers with the social commentary of the 19th century. The web videos employ Lydia, a character largely ignored in literary scholarship, to explore the dynamics of Austen's women in a male-dominated society. It makes her relatable and dynamic, using the loud, flirtatious girl from the novel to create a still-loud but vulnerable woman viewers are able to empathize and identify with. In this article, I use LBD's Lydia to explore topics of slut-shaming and victim-blaming language, relationship violence and shame-induced silence. Through these topics, Lydia's story warns modern audiences of the consequences of their indifference when it comes to sexual harassment and violence toward women. In light of the #metoo movement and allegations of powerful men keeping victims silent, conversations about victimizing and deprioritizing women have become prevalent across the country. I show how using Austen to examine these social issues can bring light to the progress—or lack there-of—that's occurred over the past 200 years

“Lizzie’s Story Felt Like Home:” Meaning-Making and Narratively-Constructed Digital Intimacy in Literary Web Series

This thesis explores readers’ experiences with a genre of digital narratives known as literary (inspired) web series. These narratives present updated, digital retellings of classic literature from the Western canon and arise from the rapid development of the convergent media environment and the evolution of social media platforms. Literary web series draw on a variety of storytelling methods to create interactive, immersive, and emotionally resonant narrative experiences for readers. As hybrid media-literary artefacts, these narratives leverage the affordances of social media platforms to encourage reader participation and interaction, generate forms of narrative immersion to convey an authentic and realistic story, and capitalise on the literary resonance of their source texts to foster the development of an engaged community of readers. These methods of meaning-making help create intimate narrative experiences that provide readers with a significant and lasting connection to the text. Using the literary web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD), as a case study, this thesis explores LBD’s use of the sociotechnical affordances of YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr; LBD’s creation of narrative immersion for its readers; and the literary resonance of LBD’s source material, Pride and Prejudice. Results from a mixed-methods online survey of LBD readers and follow-up semistructured interviews with select respondents reveal that readers’ experiences with LBD were deeply meaningful and contributed to readers feeling a sense of intimate connection with the narrative and other readers. Consequently, this thesis will propose that literary web series like LBD can help drive the formation of what I have labelled “narratively-constructed digital intimacy,” an affective feeling stemming from the methods of meaning-making in LBD as well as mediated and narrative intimacies, and para-social interactions. Subsequently, reader experiences of literary web series that include narratively-constructed digital intimacy can provide readers with a “a long-lasting and ineffable sense of significance” (Stockwell, 2009a)

The Persistence of Austen in the 21st Century: A Reception History of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

In 2012, the first episode of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries aired online via YouTube.com, offering a modernized serial form of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice. With only word-of-mouth marketing, this series gained hundreds of thousands of views, a loyal following, and an Emmy award. In this paper, I will explore the reception history of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries by referencing its source material, analyzing its target demographics, and explaining its success

An Evolution of Jane and Lizzie: Adaptation Studies Need to Accommodate for the Rise of Internet-Based Media

Adaptation studies has been a part of film studies since the beginning of cinema itself. However, there is a need for a push in a new direction to incorporate and acknowledge internet-based, web-series adaptations. The purpose of this paper was to come to terms with the current status of adaptation studies as a field and to determine how to best incorporate internet-based media into the previously established framework. Combining a study of adaptation studies with a study of transmedia and the specificities of internet-based media, I looked at two web-series adaptations of classic novels: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, an adaptation of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Using these two case studies, I outlined the distinctive characteristics of web-series adaptations - their benefits and their drawbacks - as a means of showing how adaptation studies could benefit from an expansion to incorporate the new media our technology is producing

"My Name Is Lizzie Bennet": Successfully Adapting Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' (1813) for the Twenty-First Century with 'The Lizzie Bennet Diaries' (2012-2013)

This thesis argues that The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (or the LBD), the 2012 transmedia YouTube webseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is a successful adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel because – like its source text – it is all about communication. Told primarily in a video-diary format, the LBD is a transmedia narrative that spans across various traditional, digital, and social media platforms. All of the characters within the narrative interact with one another via video blogs, texts, tweets, and even handwritten letters while simultaneously inviting viewers to participate and immerse themselves in the story by responding to the characters’ online activity. The form, content, and audience engagement of this particular adaptation thus hinges on various forms of communication to tell Austen’s story of marriage, manners, and misunderstandings. The LBD therefore not only succeeds as an adaptation, but specifically as one of the definitive adaptations of Pride and Prejudice due to its ability to respectfully yet innovatively translate its source text into the twenty-first century in a way that keeps Austen’s emphasis on communication central to how, why, and with whom the story is retold. Thus, as a successful adaptation, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a successful act of communication, which gives a fresh voice to Jane Austen’s two-hundred-year-old novel, hence reaffirming its significance to a new generation of audience and preventing it from lapsing into silence

Jane Austen and Transmedia Narratives. Analysis of The Cate Morland Chronicles

The main aim of my MA thesis is to analyse The Cate Morland Chronicles (2016), a web series based on Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818), and to explore how transmedia storytelling is used to adapt and modernise a classic novel. In order to do this, different adaptation theories will be reviewed and transmedia storytelling will be introduced. Then, a review of adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels and, especially, of the adaptations of Northanger Abbey will be included. The fan phenomenon and Austenmania will be addressed as a as a possible cause of web series. Finally, the analysis will be carried out. Different transmedia storytelling approaches (Jenkins, Pratten, Scolari) will be applied to study the impact that different media (YouTube videos, blog entries and social network accounts) have had on the story. Moreover, extra-cinematic factors such as place and location (Cartmell and Whelehan, Cardwell, Stam) and the influence of other texts (Stam’s intertextual dialogism) will be studied too. Furthermore, the relation between viewers and the web series will also be analysed to discover how these new adaptations enable viewers to connect with the text. In conclusion, this MA thesis attempts to discover how transmedia narratives can go a step beyond traditional adaption and implement a new and completely different way of connecting with the text.Universidad de Granada. Máster en Litertura y Lingüística Inglesas, curso 2017-201

An Unfounded Universal Truth: A Contemporary Feminist Understanding of Pride and Prejudice

Many people have deemed Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen a timeless tale. This story has been adapted through many different mediums and has been reimagined in all different contexts. One of the most recent reincarnations of this story is a web-series on YouTube that spanned 100 episodes. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries builds a whole new world for Austen’s familiar characters to grow and develop in. Using a feminist lens, the original novel and adaptation are examined in how both works represented the female characters. Through the analysis of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice it is clear that her characters befit the twenty-first century ideology effortlessly and, more importantly, thrive from the shift. This emphasizes the craft of Austen and her alignment with some feminist ideals

Networking narrative: a rhetorical analysis of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries

2014 Spring.Transmedia storyscapes, nonlinear narratives told across many different media platforms, have emerged as important sites of non-traditional reading and writing practices. These narratives enable a type of reading and writing that is subversive to exclusionary Western rhetorics. This study applies a Bitzerian rhetorical analysis to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a successful transmedia storyscape. Bitzer's definitions of exigence, audience, and constraints are challenged when applied to a transmedia text. This thesis will explore how meaningful redefinitions of key elements within Bitzer's rhetorical situation can further an understanding of transmedia. This rhetorical analysis will highlight the ways in which Rhetoric and Composition can use transmedia narratives to make space for important matters of identity and feminist forms of writing as identified by Cixous and Rich. Transmedia storyscapes are an important, though as of yet largely unconsidered, form of digital rhetorics. This thesis seeks to establish transmedia storyscapes as a viable genre of writing that successfully embodies feminist principles through the subversion of traditional writing practices