Sarah E Fanning

School: College of Humanities
Department: English
Research Centre/Unit: English and Film

I completed my BA (honours) at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2002, with a concentration in Victorian literature. In 2006, I graduated the University of New Brunswick with a MA degree. My thesis was entitled Gendered Space and Feminist Ideology: Pride and Prejudice and its Two BBC Adaptations, which analyzed the ways in the interior and exterior worlds of the nineteenth century are negotiated both in Austen and onscreen. During my MA, I received a grant for a research trip in England. I was fortunate to be able to interview screenwriter Andrew Davies about the practice of adaptation for television, with specific reference to his 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I began my PhD at Exeter in 2007. Currently I am in my final year and am writing up for submission in late summer 2012. My doctoral thesis analyzes the different adaptive processes involved in both film and television adaptations of the Brontes from 1939-2009. It explores how adaptive histories have revised and reshaped both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights through a range of industrial and sociocultural influences. It considers how shifting ideas about masculinity in each era bear upon reinterpretation of Rochester and Heathcliff's characterizations. It demonstrates how formal elements like the Hollywood star system, the rise of the television serial, and the heritage film/television industry of the late 20th century have impacted these rereadings, and also how concepts of masculinity have worked to inform each adaptation.