A thoroughly researched, somewhat scholarly investigation of Austen’s oeuvre for devoted Austen fans with some background in...
Biographer Byrne (Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth, 2016, etc.) explores Jane Austen’s passion for the theatre and the influence of comedic plays on her writing.
In this updated edition of her first book, originally published by an academic press as Jane Austen and the Theatre, Byrne focuses on the theatrical world of the late 18th century, providing a broad history of the playwrights and the theaters of that time as well as an overview of the performances that Austen attended. The performances served as a source of inspiration for the private family theatricals of Austen’s youth and closely influenced her early attempts at playwriting and fiction and eventually her novel Mansfield Park. In later chapters, Byrne examines how Austen’s knowledge of theatrical technique and use of dialogue played an essential role in building effective scenes and developing characters in all of her novels. The author’s updates of her previous book, geared toward drawing in nonscholarly readers, include an introduction assessing Austen’s increased popularity over the past two decades and, in the final chapter, “Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood,” assessments of the many film and theatrical adaptations of Austen’s work that have captivated audiences over the past century. These include A.A. Milne’s play Miss Elizabeth Bennet, numerous versions of Pride and Prejudice, and the outrageously subversive updating of Emma as the film Clueless, and Byrne evaluates which have proven most successful on their own terms. This chapter, though perhaps more accessible for contemporary readers of Austen, represents a departure from her more scholarly arguments. Ultimately, she writes, “the key difference between the merely escapist and romantic screen renditions of Jane Austen and those that truly succeed as works of art in their own right is the adaptation’s truth not to the letter of her text…but to the spirit of her comedy. The spirit, that is, which she herself learned from the comedic theatre.”
A thoroughly researched, somewhat scholarly investigation of Austen’s oeuvre for devoted Austen fans with some background in literature.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-267449-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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