Abstract:

The growing number of zombie narratives across diverse media indicate a revival of the zombie genre in the early twenty-first century, in particular in the United States. These narratives deal with not only the fight for survival but also with the consequences of the global zombie outbreak as in Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 zombie mash-up novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Adhering closely to the plot of Austen’s 1813 novel, Grahame-Smith nevertheless transforms early 19th-century England into a place menaced by a plague of the undead where the five Bennet sisters are accomplished martial arts warriors and Fitzwilliam Darcy is a monster-hunter possessing superior Oriental fighting skills. It is clear that both literary and filmic rewritings of Jane Austen’s canonical work, Pride and Prejudice (1813) still find large and enthusiastic audiences: Grahame-Smith’s book immediately became a New York Times bestseller, with more than 700,000 copies sold worldwide while the film rights were quickly acquired by Hollywood. Director Burr Steers, who also wrote the screenplay of the post-apocalyptic Pride and Prejudice + Zombies (2016), inserts a prologue and a final zombie attack into the narrative and yet, as this paper argues, successfully preserves the essence of the story as well as the formal elements of theme, characterization, style, and tone from the Graham-Smith novel.

Keywords: