Bits of Ivory on the Silver Screen: Austen in Multimodal Quotation and Translation

Studying the Austen film industry through the lens of multimodal stylistics means applying new analytical tools to a well-known phenomenon. Since a rather mysterious 1938 ‘teleplay’ of Pride and Prejudice, there have been numerous cinematic and TV adaptations of Austen’s novels. These adaptations, in turn, have prompted academic examination from such different fields as cinema studies, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Multimodal stylistics is a very recent (sub-) discipline of scientific enquiry which stems from the realization that: 1), much of the relevant writing that makes a real impact on worldwide audiences today is of a multimodal nature; and 2), a lot of this multimodal material has so far been subjected, particularly by stylisticians, to analyses of an essentially linguistic kind. In this article, the focus is on two recent versions of "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice" are subjected to multimodal stylistic scrutiny.