Academic Scientific JournalsThe nostalgic chronotope of the English country house in "Pride and Prejudice" and "Death Comes to Pemberley"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2025.3.07Keywords:
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Death Comes to Pemberley, adaptation, country house ideal, nostalgiaAbstract
The article proposes to discuss the representations of Pemberley as an expression of the country house ideal in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s novel and its 1995 adaptation, and in Death Comes to Pemberley, P. D. James’s book and the television series, in the context of manorial nostalgia. I want to argue that by changing the genre and reinterpreting the principal conflicts and characters, the sequel redefines significantly the nostalgic impulse associated with Austen’s novel. A comparative analysis of the changing patterns of manorial idealizations across the four narratives will demonstrate how the nostalgic chronotope is constructed and deconstructed and how the semiotic modelling of space changes in response to the intermedial translation between fiction and film. The paper will locate the analysis in a broader context of the country house literary tradition and manorial representations in heritage films.
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