The process of transformation from Jane Austen's nineteenth - century novel `Emma' to Amy Heckerling's twentieth - century film `Clueless' has been dramatic but at the same time retained the essential ideas of the original text. Mazmanian states, `Clueless...exemplifies how popular culture re-appropriates Austen's novels to serve up-dated agendas...Emma (offers) a thematic skeleton.'

Emma is a novel set in the parochial Highbury. This canonical text offers a rural representation of 19th century English life, a world characterized by tight formal social rituals, the high status of marriage, stigma attached to sexual relationships and a world of social and physical immobility. The era which Austen wrote was a time of violent change as it was an Age of Revolution. Despite this fact, Austen's novels, particularly `Emma', deal with revolutions within characters, rather than dealing with external revolutions. `Emma' focuses on marriage, which is a crucial establishment...