ABSTRACT
The association between Austen’s novels and escapism is nowhere more marked than in the trenches of the Great War, as British soldiers retreated into, and sought solace from, her writing and, implicitly, an idealised past. A century after shell-shocked soldiers yearned for the vanished world of Pride and Prejudice, the self-reflexive interplay between past and present in YouTube fanvids and Jerusha Hess’s Austenland demonstrates that Austenian escapism has evolved. Such productions complicate and question the very notion of “escapism”, as well as Rudyard Kipling’s sentiment that “there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place”. The combination of “heritage” shots with “pop” music, for example, establishes the past as idealised and yet contemporised, while Austen’s “world” is upheld and undermined as an idyll, both on screen and on internet “discussion boards”. Using Austen’s reception in the Great War as a reference point, this essay will focus on a selection of YouTube fanvids, alongside Austenland, and will cast new light on the author’s afterlives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, interrogating the complex interplay between hypotext and paratext, past and present, in the Austenian flight from “guilt and misery”.
