Abstract

Jane Austen’s romantic novel “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) is widely considered a creative and artistic milestone in English literature. Almost 200 years after its original publication, Austen’s novel was edited and re-written by American novelist and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith as the horror parody novel “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Grahame-Smith retains most of Austen’s original text and credits her as a co-author. He sets Austen’s story in an alternate historical nineteenth-century England befallen by a zombie apocalypse. In this setting, Darcy is a monster hunter and the Bennet sisters are trained by their father to defeat the undead. This article argues that Grahame-Smith’s work consciously combines an extant classic of literature with contemporary pop culture tropes to entertain a new generation of consumers. It argues that these consumers embrace a specific and emergent aesthetic taste which finds beauty in violence, and uses Grahame-Smith’s text to explore and reflect upon an aesthetic of violence which has bred a cultural obsession with apocalypses, zombies, and dystopias.