Relocating Shakespeare and Austen on Screen

Both Shakespeare and Jane Austen are icons of Englishness, but in the eight major film adaptations discussed here both are radically dislocated from their traditional contexts in ways which allow for a powerful interrogation not only of what these texts mean in the modern world but also, in many cases, of what Englishness itself means, particularly in relation to two countries whose identities Britain helped shape but which have now broken definitively away from it - the United States and India. Both Shakespeare and Austen wrote at crucial moments in what was to become the history of colonialism; in this book, Austen-based films are paired with Shakespeare-based ones to explore what happens when these classic texts are moved from their original context into new locations.