Jane Austen’s characters have taken centre stage in meme culture as they have been discovered by a “young generation of digital natives” in the post-MeToo era, according to research.
The influential novelist who died in 1817 has had audiences swooning over Mr Darcy since she wrote of his romance with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Her works have spawned a collection of screen adaptations and Darcy has now emerged as a “meme idol” online, the authors of a study published in the journal Humanities wrote.
They suggested the popularity of Austen’s characters on social media is in part because her books effectively contained memes-in-waiting before the concept existed, in a “foreshadowing of post-millennial memes”. The authors also argue that Darcy, through famous portrayals by Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC series of Pride and Prejudice and by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film, has “activated new re-imaginings of masculinity and heterosexuality in the post-MeToo epoch”.
