Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
There have been innumerable modern interpretations of Shakespeare. "West Side Story", to name but one example, is an adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet". I think many people would say that West Side Story is an excellent work in its own right, and can be enjoyed without the least knowledge of Shakespeare. Heck, I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who watch it don't even realise that it is an adaptation of Shakespeare.
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But ... to follow up on this point .... the plot device/theme of star crossed lovers from warring families/clans, etc. was not new with Shakespeare, and has been used in other settings/centuries successfully. You don't have to have read, or be aware of, the 'original' occurrence of a theme in literature to enjoy the version before you.
BUT, Austen's novels are firmly linked to their temporal setting. Her novels contain characters whose conversation, actions, settings, and life stories make sense only in their respective century. That's what makes them such rich reading - you enter another world in another time - and follow the lives of characters whose lives follow rules quite different from your own. That's the charm of reading Austen in the 21st century.
If you want to read about families living in the 21st century, there are scores of novels published each year. There's no need to temporally transplant characters, or mangle plot lines, to 'update' a classic novel for contemporary readers.
Modern authors can write a novel as an homage to a prior author's work, but it is an original creation, not a copy or 'update'. For example, Cynthia Ozick is one of the foremost scholars on the works of Henry James. Her novel
Foreign Bodies is an homage to James'
The Ambassadors. But her novel is not a simple updating of James' plot line to set it in the 1950's. Instead, Ozick created a unique world of her own, whose characters loosely follow the general plot of
The Ambassadors but their stories belong to them (and Ozick), not to James. That's the difference.