ABSTRACT
Seth Grahame-Smith’s mash-up of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has proved extremely successful in many ways. It has inspired numerous further novels mashing up literary classics with zombies, vampires, ghosts, mummies, and sea-monsters. It has also achieved considerable critical recognition as the ironic, parodic, and postmodern combination of the Austenian universe with the zombie threat has opened up to various discourses, feminist and social politics being prominent ones. As is the case with many Austenian variations, the mash-up novel got adapted for the screen. Burr Steers’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes many liberties with its literary hypotexts, radically reinventing both Austen and Grahame-Smith’s mash-up. Relishing in the zombie horror genre, the film more clearly plunges into the politics of Austen’s universe. Revealing and challenging its social hierarchy, the film brings up issues of social discrimination, particularly in the context of class, gender, and colonialism. Using the zombie threat and thriving on an apocalyptic narrative, the film offers a critique of the vital social problems of Austen’s novel. Class and gender issues powerfully intersect in the context of the looming zombie apocalypse, presenting Austen’s Hertfordshire as a place that hardly deserves to be saved from annihilation.
