Il Corpo di Jane Austen. Incarnazioni letterarie e filmiche tra desiderio e repressione

Is there really a “lack of body” in Austen’s novels? Is really her prose devoid of desire? Even though many critics have often affirmed that in her books passion is silenced and repression dominates, her readers know better. This study aims to track the presence and the evolution of the corporeity of Austen’s characters in the novels and in their film adaptations (or appropriations). The research shows how passion and body are two entities which are not absent in Austen’s world: they are hidden behind allusions, hinted at in focalizations, or transfigured into synecdoches and metaphors. From Northanger Abbey to Persuasion, from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the semantic analysis shows how the novels and the films share common rhetoric figures, parallel stylistic techniques and, perhaps not surprisingly, the same values.