Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium 1st ed. 2024 Edition
Author(s): Eric Parisot (Author)
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
- Publication Date: January 3, 2024
- Edition: 1st ed. 2024
- Language: English
- Print length: 136 pages
- ISBN-10: 3031492854
- ISBN-13: 9783031492853
Book Description
Jane Austen and Vampires is the first book to investigate the literary convergence of Jane Austen and vampires in Austen fanfic after the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). It asks how the shifting cultural values of Austen and the vampire have aligned, and what their connection might mean for their respective contemporary legacies. It also makes a case for reading “low brow” Austen fanfic attentively, as a way to gain meaningful insight directly from Austen fans into the tensions and anxieties surrounding contemporary notions of love, sex, femininity, and Austen’s modern currency. Offering close readings of Austen’s vampire-slaying heroines, vampiric retellings of Pride and Prejudice, and the transformation of Austen herself into a vampire, this book reveals Austen-vampire mashups as messy, complex entanglements that creatively and self-reflexively interrogate modern fantasies of vampire romance. By its unique intersection of Jane Austen with the vampire, the Gothic, fan culture and popular romance, Jane Austen and Vampires adds a new chapter to the history of Austen’s reception, for fans, students and scholars alike.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Fans have turned Austen’s novels into a Gothic playground, as Eric Parisot puts it, but it’s Parisot himself who breathes new life into unearthing their common ground in this persuasive, blood-soaked book. Jane Austen and Vampires brilliantly explains not only why today’s paranormal mashups have emerged but how they’ve enlarged the novelist’s genius.” (Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English, Arizona State University)
“In this engaging study, Parisot delves into the world of Austen-themed vampire fiction to explore what it reveals about Austen’s own undying cultural significance. Examining novels in which Austen’s characters, and sometimes Austen herself, are reimagined as vampires, he deftly draws out the underlying historical and symbolic logic that make such combinations far less unlikely than they might initially seem!” (Joseph Crawford, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Exeter)
From the Back Cover
Jane Austen and Vampires is the first book to investigate the literary convergence of Jane Austen and vampires in Austen fanfic after the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). It asks how the shifting cultural values of Austen and the vampire have aligned, and what their connection might mean for their respective contemporary legacies. It also makes a case for reading “low brow” Austen fanfic attentively, as a way to gain meaningful insight directly from Austen fans into the tensions and anxieties surrounding contemporary notions of love, sex, femininity, and Austen’s modern currency. Offering close readings of Austen’s vampire-slaying heroines, vampiric retellings of Pride and Prejudice, and the transformation of Austen herself into a vampire, this book reveals Austen-vampire mashups as messy, complex entanglements that creatively and self-reflexively interrogate modern fantasies of vampire romance. By its unique intersection of Jane Austen with the vampire, the Gothic, fan culture and popular romance, Jane Austen and Vampires adds a new chapter to the history of Austen’s reception, for fans, students and scholars alike.
About the Author
Eric Parisot is a Senior Lecturer in English at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia). He has published widely in the fields of eighteenth-century British and Gothic literature, and is the author of Graveyard Poetry (Ashgate, 2013).
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