The passion translated: literary and cinematic rhetoric in Pride and Prejudice

This study will highlight how rhetorical devices and stylistic techniques are employed both in the novel Pride and Prejudice and in its film adaptations to transform and mitigate the destabilizing power of passion. The use of tropes, such as synecdoche and metonymy, and of the stylistic technique of focalization, finds its effective counterpart in the filmic grammar that includes close-ups, insert shots, subjective shots, eyeline matches and reaction shots. The direct correspondence between the literary devices chosen by Jane Austen and the visual equivalents employed by the cinema will be elaborated.