ABSTRACT
This paper examines the new genre of the literary mash-up by situating Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and Ben H. Winter’s Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009) within the larger tradition of Jane Austen adaptations. In order to address how the genre of the “mash-up” could arise from the reading of a classic text and explain the possible impact of such narrative insertions and interruptions on the original author’s work, this paper proposes a theory of penetrative reading that highlights the disruptive and often violent potential of the reader. Penetrative in both a methodological sense and in terms of the sexually suggestive and explicitly violent content that is inserted into the source text, Grahame-Smith’s and Winters’s revisions of Austen not only violate the integrity of the author’s original text but also complicate the gender dynamics at play within each narrative, ultimately re-gendering not only Austen’s heroines but also Austen herself. Commodifying not only the words of Austen but also the catch-phrases, key terms, and concepts of feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial literary theory, these hybrid narratives unconsciously interrogate and satirize the very act of scholarly interpretation.
