ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s the Austen adaptation juggernaut has enabled audiences to get their Austen fix in myriad ways, heritage films, Hollywood blockbusters, Bollywood blockbusters, online vlog series, BBC/PBS miniseries, TV movies, big-budget films, Indie films, biopics, zombie mash-ups-the list goes on. Many feminist film scholars have deemed the competing terms inherent in the modern "woman's film" as indicative of the, ultimately, regressive "postfeminist" cultural work done by these films. This chapter argues that such tensions are not necessarily postfeminist or politically regressive, per se, as they engage fruitfully with their historical contexts and the Regency-era paradoxes Jane Austen's writing also addresses. A "postfeminist" stance is rooted in the assumption that the women's movement has alleviated the fundamental problems of female inequality and women's oppression and that women therefore face simply "human" (middle and upper-class, white, Western/Northern) liberal, individualist issues, such as finding both a fulfilling heterosexual romance and a good job.
