Jane Austen and the Zombie Authorship Phenomenon in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Abstract: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, is a literary mashup, a fragmentation procedure of a classical work so as to engraft into it elements from contemporary pop culture. One of the main questions raised by the novel involves the palimpsest game inherent to its authorship, since the work was produced through the writings of a dead author (Austen) and a living author (Grahame-Smith). The English novelist from the regency period had already experienced intricate dynamics of authorship attribution to her own works when they were published for the first time. In this context, we herein analyze the dialectics between a living author/dead letter and a living work/dead writer, so important in the artistic collaboration that generated Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.