On Tuesday, October 4, at 6.30pm, the Storm Petrel Foundation in Attard will be hosting Jane Eyre's Afterlives in India and the West Indies, a soirée organised by the Master of Arts in Film Studies and the Department of English, University of Malta.
Prof. Gloria Lauri-Lucente, co-ordinator of the Master of Arts in Film Studies and head of the Department of Italian, will introduce the evening on the afterlives of Jane Eyre, which will consist of two parts; the first part will be a reading from the novel A Marble Column (2022) by the author herself, Cicely Havely while the second part will consist of a short talk by Prof. Saviour Catania on Jacques Tourneur’s film I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
A Q&A session with Havely and Catania will be held at the end and will be moderated by Lauri-Lucente.
A Marble Column – Jane Eyre in India
The last lines of Jane Eyre are not given to Jane and Mr Rochester, but to the unknown fate of Jane's rejected suitor, St John Rivers. Staying close to the themes of Charlotte Brontë 's original novel, A Marble Column takes Jane and her husband to India to uncover the mystery.
Cicely Havely’s interest in fiction began at Somerville College, Oxford. From there, she moved into adult education, and in 1967 joined the fledgling Open University where she eventually became head of the Literature Department. Along the way, she joined the editorial board of a widely circulated journal for school students. A Marble Column is the belated outcome of a lifetime’s ambition to prove that those who teach might also write.
I Walked with a Zombie
Catania will read a section of his paper entitled Tourneur/Lewton's I Walked with a Zombie: A Brontëan Hypertext of the Cinefantastic. The talk will show how despite its significant departure from the source text, Zombie’s transcultural flight thrives on Brontë's ambivalent "shade[s] of the supernatural".
Catania teaches English Literature and Film Studies at the University of Malta. His main areas of research are Film Appropriations and Film Theory with a special focus on foreign film versions of English literary works. He has published studies in prestigious journals such as Literature/Film Quarterly, Brontë Studies, Entertext, Merope and Studia Filmoznawcze and contributed book chapters to anthologies Adapting Poe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Shared Waters (co-authored/Rodopi, 2009), and World-Wide Shakespeares (Routledge, 2005). He is currently working on transcultural appropriations of Wuthering Heights in film.
Places are limited so early booking is advised. E-mail richard.gambin@um.edu.mt with ‘Jane Eyre's Afterlives’ in the subject line and give your name and the number of places you would like to reserve.