Parodic elements women and power in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 1.0 University of Kassel (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik) course: Proseminar Jane Austen language: English abstract: Pride and Prejudice certainly is one of the best-known and most frequently criticised works by Jane Austen. Its ironic opening lines It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife already hint at some of the novel's topics such as the omnipresence of marriage in female biographies and the constructions of power through wealth. But what happens if a 21st century writer combines the original plot of Pride and Prejudice with popular aspects of the Eastern culture? The novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies written by Seth Grahame-Smith and published in 2009 does so by partly adopting the original text and by inserting (often violent) parts of modern popular culture. The half-conserving half-comic transformation of the well-known opening lines into It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains is only one of the numerous means of parody the narrative makes use of playing on the contrast between its original as an appreciated classic and the frivolous tone of its parody. This paper will show that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a parody. It will identify and discuss the elements and strategies that are typical of parodies. What gets parodied and how? What effect does this create? These are the central questions this paper seeks to answer. First of all the approaches of several post-modern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon and Simon Dentith will serve as basic definitions in order to explain the theoretical aspects and properties of parodies. Important characteristics such as the paradox nature of parodies and the theory of encoding and decoding will be taken into account. The second