Pride and Prejudice is a classic tale written by Jane Austen. It has been studied and written about and more recently it has been remixed into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. The story contains the same characters as the original and the same English town. But this time Elizabeth is well versed in martial arts and Mr. Darcy is a well-known zombie killer. The two still fall in love in this book, but this time it’s during a zombie apocalypse. Goodreads describes the book as one that is “complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses” (Austen).
Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 and has been published thousands of times since then. It was only a matter of time before someone was going to put their own twist on it, and it just so happens that it included zombies. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is pretty much the same book, except with additional zombie scenes and violence. For example, the ball scene, in the beginning, is pretty much the same as the original, but this time it erupts in a zombie attack. The book has many of the same themes as the original since they both explore the social confines of class.
According to Dustin W. Edwards, I would classify this kind of remix as reappropriation because it “involves making tactical changes to an existing text” (Edwards 47). The author used the original Pride and Prejudice as a base and then applied his own ideas to make it something new. I will also say that this is genre remix because the book “moves in and out of genre expectations” (Edwards 48) blending the horror genre with romance and comedy. When I first heard about this book I wondered, like Jordyn, how this book wasn’t in any violation of copyright. But then I remembered that Pride and Prejudice is part of the public domain. This means that no copyright laws were broken in the publishing of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Remixing is a way for us as media and content producers to create something new out of something old. The something old doesn’t always have to be a piece of classic literature nor does the remix have to include zombies, but the remix should be something that challenges the norms of what we already know.
Word Count: 386
Works Cited:
Edwards, Dustin W. “Framing Remix Rhetorically: Toward a Typology of Transformative Work.” Computers and Composition 39 (2016): 41-54. 24 Dec. 2015. Web. 26 Feb. 2018.
Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith Jane. “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, #1).” Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, www.goodreads.com/book/show/5899779-pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies.