120 Days of Seven Days in May?

When a complimentary copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies arrived in 2009, along with a publisher’s letter intimating that as an Austen scholar I might relish this latest testimony to her influence, I assumed the book would disappear as rapidly as most other specimens of contemporary Austeneana. But I was wrong. Seth Grahame-Smith’s introduction of “ultraviolent zombie mayhem to Austen’s literary classic soon hit the New York Times bestseller list. Now it is a film (pictured) with Lily James moving on from her turn as Natasha in the BBC’s War and Peace to playing Elizabeth Bennet as an adept zombie-slayer. 

Is the literary mash-up a passing fad or a fertile new genre? The art of mashing up involves putting together two completely incongruous genres, only to discover that something in the high-cultural original matches the low material with which it is mixed. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the Bennet girls prepare themselves for encounters with the undead just as enthusiastically as they prepare themselves for husband-hunting in the original. When Elizabeth walks across the fields to visit her sister, she is assaulted by a gaggle of zombies and survives only by dint of her skills in martial arts. “Elizabeth found herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.”. The sentence is very nearly as Jane Austen wrote it, though Elizabeth’s exercise has been even more strenuous than in the original text. Those “weary ankles” come from decapitating “unmentionables” with well-aimed kicks. 

Inspirited by Grahame-Smith’s lucrative example, others followed. We have had Little Women and Werewolves and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. But many possibilities remain. Even now publishers must be encouraging young would-be authors with English Literature degrees and a taste for popular culture to think of the mash-ups that have yet to be attempted...