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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.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Reading Austen-Vampire Mashups.- 2. To Kiss or Kill? Austen's Vampire-Slaying Heroines.- 3. Trouble in Paradise: Pride and Prejudice as Vampire Romance.- 4. Eternally Yours: Jane Austen as Vampire.- 5. Conclusion: An Unlikely Confluence.
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).
