Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies

Jane Austen sells. She sells in all possible ways, her novels have been adapted for the cinema and the stage, they have been rewritten as comics and graphic novels. Jane austen is a cultural icon. The interest in her life is so strong that many biographies have been written in order to recover new f...

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Main Author: Eleonora Federici
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: UNICApress 2017-01-01
Series:Between
Subjects:
Online Access:http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/2612
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author Eleonora Federici
author_facet Eleonora Federici
author_sort Eleonora Federici
collection DOAJ
description Jane Austen sells. She sells in all possible ways, her novels have been adapted for the cinema and the stage, they have been rewritten as comics and graphic novels. Jane austen is a cultural icon. The interest in her life is so strong that many biographies have been written in order to recover new facts and details. The places where she has lived and the places depicted in her novels have become tourist sites for literary pilgrims. Austen is a cross-over phenomenon, with regency costume balls recreated in her name and an endless proliferation of her works in all media. My essay will investigate Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a mash-up novel which has become a real cultural phenomenon of the last decade and will demonstrate how it can be considered a serial narrative. If as Henry Jenkins asserts, seriality implies the unfolding of a story over time through a process of “chunking” (that is creating meaningful parts of the same story) and of “dispersal” (that is breaking the story into more parts and in more genres and media), mash-ups seems to do this.  Austen’s story remains as a “story hook” which pushes the reader to come back to different products for a continuation of the same story. So, if on the one hand, seriality occurs within the same text, the story-telling of Austen’s stories across genres and media is part of a seriality process.
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spelling doaj.art-0625a2221b1d440cbdef2c822f4b53c02023-08-02T09:11:50ZengUNICApressBetween2039-65972017-01-0161110.13125/2039-6597/26121826Serial Austen. Mashingups with ZombiesEleonora Federici0L'Orientale NapoliJane Austen sells. She sells in all possible ways, her novels have been adapted for the cinema and the stage, they have been rewritten as comics and graphic novels. Jane austen is a cultural icon. The interest in her life is so strong that many biographies have been written in order to recover new facts and details. The places where she has lived and the places depicted in her novels have become tourist sites for literary pilgrims. Austen is a cross-over phenomenon, with regency costume balls recreated in her name and an endless proliferation of her works in all media. My essay will investigate Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a mash-up novel which has become a real cultural phenomenon of the last decade and will demonstrate how it can be considered a serial narrative. If as Henry Jenkins asserts, seriality implies the unfolding of a story over time through a process of “chunking” (that is creating meaningful parts of the same story) and of “dispersal” (that is breaking the story into more parts and in more genres and media), mash-ups seems to do this.  Austen’s story remains as a “story hook” which pushes the reader to come back to different products for a continuation of the same story. So, if on the one hand, seriality occurs within the same text, the story-telling of Austen’s stories across genres and media is part of a seriality process.http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/2612mash-up novelsPride and PrejudiceJane Austenserial narrativestorytelling
spellingShingle Eleonora Federici
Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies
Between
mash-up novels
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
serial narrative
storytelling
title Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies
title_full Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies
title_fullStr Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies
title_full_unstemmed Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies
title_short Serial Austen. Mashingups with Zombies
title_sort serial austen mashingups with zombies
topic mash-up novels
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
serial narrative
storytelling
url http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/view/2612
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