<i>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i>: A Zombified (Textual) Body

Abstract

At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the publishing market saw the rise of a new form of textual composition, the literary mashup, which is produced by means of reading and writing movements that empower Barthes’ understanding of texts as "tissues of quotations"; to do so, a mashup is based on procedures of fragmentation of a classic work so as to insert elements of contemporary pop culture in it. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, was the pioneer of this trend, thus paving the way for a new wave in the industry of best-sellers produced through the same procedures. This paper analyzes the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in order to understand, in terms of immanence, the procedures through which Austen’s nineteenth century writing and Grahame-Smith’s contemporary writing were mixed in the entrails of the novel, thus molding a hybrid work, which is a zombie as well, since it lies between the writing of a dead author and that of a living one. Thereby, by adopting the image of the zombie not only as plot element, but also as a process of writing and adaptation – through the zombification of the novel by Jane Austen –, we aim to analyze the entrails of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, based on the concept of literary mashup, the genre that gave rise to the mixture of different texts within the work by means of hybridization procedures.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a762.