Camilla Wallin Lämsä

In the online sphere, Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy is no longer the Regency heartthrob we may think we know. He is continously reimagined through the use of postfeminist concepts, affects, and sensibilities, which are both parodic and emotional in nature, demonstrating an online stance I call ”ironic affect.” In my doctoral thesis, I examine this digital reconceptualization of Mr Darcy on the platform Tumblr, by attending to the ambiguities and tensions in hybrid multimedia creations like GIFs, memes, headcanons, and hashtags. My primary interest lies in the way Darcy is represented, and his affects performed, by fans for self-fashioning and queer community-building. I also discuss the underground aesthetic subculture of “yearningcore” flourishing on Tumblr, as Darcy has been transformed from an object of desire to an affective model on which to stylize the online self.