The internet's celebration of Pride and Prejudice's 200th anniversary is still going strong. Bloomsbury author Evan Gottlieb just published this article for the Huffington Post: Jane Austen and Zombies: Old Novels, New Insights. From the article:
For those of us who teach and write about 18th- and 19th-century
literature, the unexpected success of Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,
has been bittersweet. On the one hand, I want to cheer that Jane
Austen's "classic Regency romance," as Grahame-Smith's title page
cheerily describes it, continues to resonate with readers; her blend of
old-fashioned manners and modern social observations clearly still
strikes a chord in our age of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. On the other hand, it hurts that many readers, perhaps encountering
Elizabeth and Darcy for the first time in Grahame-Smith's souped-up
versions, will be disappointed when almost any subsequent forays they
make into "old books" fail to turn up enough (or any) references to
martial arts and flesh-eating undead to sustain their interest.
Continue reading here.
Evan's latest book, Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory will be publishing soon. Check out more information here.