Inspired by the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s 2025 exhibition From Haworth to Eternity,

Brontë Studies invites new and original articles of no more than 7,500 words that respond to the theme of ‘the Brontës and adaptation’ across film, screen, and the visual and performing arts—including digital, transmedia, and other emerging media forms. The special issue will be published in 2027.

The Brontës’ enduring popularity stems from the power and originality of their narratives, whose continual adaption across forms and media has ensured their lasting presence. From John Courtney’s Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor (1848) —which Charlotte herself declined to attend— to Abdul Rashid Kardar and Dilip Kumar’s Hindi-language adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Dil Diya Dard Liya (1966) to BBC Radio 4’s ten-episode radio serial The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (2011, UK) to Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës (2020), these examples only begin to suggest the Brontës’ long and global history of adaptation across stage, screen, and other media forms to be explored in this special issue.

While there is a body of scholarly work tracing the breadth of the Brontës’ lives and literary outputs across screen, radio, and theatre, critical gaps remain, particularly in elucidating the range and diversity of adaptations beyond the UK or Hollywood and in global contexts. Extending what Lucasta Miller describes as “the burgeoning cornucopia of recorded Brontëana” (2014, 254), this special issue encourages new and original scholarship into how the Brontës and their works are reimagined across performance, film, and visual arts, as well as through digital, interactive, and transmedia forms that challenge traditional boundaries of adaptation. This special issue intentionally seeks to broaden our understandings of how the Brontës and their works have been reimagined and recreated from the Victorian to the present day.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Adapting the Brontës through biodrama and biographical performance
• Adaptation and mythmaking: challenging inherited narratives of the Brontës
• Anachronism, temporality, and historical remix across performance and media
• Dance, opera, and musical theatre adaptations and scores
• Immersive/interactive theatre, live art and installation
• Television/streaming seriality; miniseries vs feature film
• Radio/audio drama, podcasts, sound design as adaptation
• Animation/stop-motion/comics/graphic novels
• Web series, YouTube/TikTok, ARGs, games, and playable adaptations
• Transmedia storyworlds, platform algorithms, and recommendation cultures
• Fan practices: cosplay, fanfic, fansubbing, scanlation, meme cultures
• AI-assisted adaptation
• Global South, postcolonial, diasporic retellings
• Translation and adaptation
• Heritage, tourism, and museum culture shaping adaptation economies
• Gender/sexuality/queer/trans readings
• Race/ethnicity/caste/class, including colour-conscious casting
• Disability aesthetics, neurodiversity, trauma, and embodiment in performance/screen
• Costume, hair/makeup, sets, props, soundscapes as meaning-makers
• Moors, interiors, and domestic space across adapted media
• Community theatre/school productions and local/global circulation
• Digital Humanities approaches: mapping, network graphs, intertexts, open datasets, etc.

Submission Instructions

Please submit articles in English (though we welcome non-English primary sources with translated excerpts) of no more than 7,500 words (including notes, tables, captions, and bibliography) via the journal’s submission portal by October 5, 2026, 11:59 PM GMT.

Articles should be the author’s own original work and not generated by artificial intelligence tools. Use of AI in drafting or analysis should be disclosed and must not replace original scholarly argument.

All articles should adhere to the journal’s ‘Instructions for Authors’ guidance and follow the journal’s ‘Style Guide for Contributors’. As per the journal’s policy, all articles will be subject to double-blind peer review. The special issue will be published in 2027 and will be guest edited by Professor Kate Faber Oestreich. If you have any questions about the call or the special issue, please direct them to the journal’s Editor, Claire O’Callaghan, via email to brontestudies@bronte.org.uk.