Jane Vows Vengeance

How will Jane Austen break the news to her fiancé that she’s not only undead, but also a two-hundred-plus-year-old literary icon? In sleepy upstate New York, Jane’s wedding preparations have taken on a bloodsucking intensity. So when Walter suggests they ditch it all and combine their marriage and honeymoon with a house tour of Europe, Jane jumps at the chance to flee Lord Byron and the lingering threat of Charlotte Brontë. But to Jane’s chagrin, more than one secret from her past is about to resurface. From an Agatha Christie–style murder mystery to a wedding interrupted by the ghosts of the Princes in the Tower to a shocking revelation about Walter’s mother, nothing about this trip is less than pure mayhem. And when a chance encounter puts Jane on the trail of a legendary device reputed to restore a vampire’s human soul, will our beloved heroine finally be able to vow her love and devotion—or will a vampire hunter’s vengeance drive a stake through her eternal life?

After two hundred years undead, Jane Austen still has bite. But will her most recent literary success be her last? Life was a lot easier for Jane when she was just an unknown, undead bookstore owner in a sleepy hamlet in upstate New York. But now the world embraces her as Jane Fairfax, author of the bestselling novel Constance—and she’s having a killer time trying to keep her true identity as the Jane Austen a secret. Even the ongoing lessons in How to Be a Vampire, taught by her former lover Lord Byron, don’t seem to be helping much. Jane can barely focus on her boyfriend, Walter, while keeping him in the dark about her more sanguine tastes. To make matters worse, Walter announces that his mother is coming for a visit—and she’s expecting Jane to be Jewish. Add in a demanding new editor, a convention of romance readers in period costume, a Hollywood camera crew following Jane’s every move, and the constant threat of a certain bloodsucking Brontë sister coming back to finish her off, and it’s enough to make even the most well-mannered heroine go batty!

Jane Austen and Vampires is the first book to investigate the literary convergence of Jane Austen and vampires in Austen fanfic after the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). It asks how the shifting cultural values of Austen and the vampire have aligned, and what their connection might mean for their respective contemporary legacies. It also makes a case for reading “low brow” Austen fanfic attentively, as a way to gain meaningful insight directly from Austen fans into the tensions and anxieties surrounding contemporary notions of love, sex, femininity, and Austen’s modern currency. Offering close readings of Austen’s vampire-slaying heroines, vampiric retellings of Pride and Prejudice, and the transformation of Austen herself into a vampire, this book reveals Austen-vampire mashups as messy, complex entanglements that creatively and self-reflexively interrogate modern fantasies of vampire romance. By its unique intersection of Jane Austen with the vampire, the Gothic, fan culture and popular romance, Jane Austen and Vampires adds a new chapter to the history of Austen’s reception, for fans, students and scholars alike.

This is the first scholarly study to explore the ever-expanding world of online Austen fandom and fan fiction writing. Using case studies from the Internet writing community and publisher, Wattpad, as well as dedicated fan websites, it illuminates the literary processes and products that have given Austen multiple afterlives in the digital arena.

Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been adapted, transformed and translated into numerous languages. Thus the classic today constitutes an international, transcultural, transmedial and iconic phenomenon of pop culture that transcends genre boundaries as easily as centuries. The vitality of the book at the crossroads of the literary canon and pop culture is analysed by contributions focusing on its translations, Bollywood adaptations, iconic TV versions or vlog adaptations, on erotic rewritings or generic transformations into Chick-Lit, crime fiction or the Gothic mode, on teaching contexts or on a diachronic analysis of its illustrations. Complemented by a compilation of student essays, this volume affirms and celebrates Pride and Prejudice being perhaps more alive than ever before.

"First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Frances Lincoln Limited under the title Happily ever after: a celebration of Pride and prejudice"--T.p. verso.

“An intelligent and generous companion to Pride and Prejudice: its author and her era, characters, language, reception, [and] adaptations.” —Sydney Morning Herald Pride and Prejudice has a fair claim to being the world’s favorite novel. Read and studied from Cheltenham to China, it’s been translated into many languages and made into countless films. This book, from longtime Jane Austen Society of Australia president Susannah Fullerton, describes how Austen wrote her masterpiece, its lukewarm initial reception, and its evolving popularity. As well as discussing sex-symbol Mr. Darcy, charming heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and the superb range of comic characters, she discusses the novel’s style: its wicked irony, brilliant structuring, and revolutionary use of the technique known as “free indirect speech.” Readers through the years have both loved the book and hated it, and the reactions of writers, politicians, artists, and explorers can tell us as much about the reader as they do about the book itself. Pride and Prejudice has morphed into many strange and interesting forms: screen adaptations, sequels, prequels, and updates. Happily Ever After explores these—and the wilder shores of zombies, porn, dating manuals, T-shirts, tourism, and therapy. “[The illustrations are] as much fun as the text.” —Star-Tribune “An enjoyable and loyally enthusiastic tribute . . . contains thoughtful plot and character summaries useful for orienting the school student, and is full of trivia for Austen enthusiasts (the term ‘Janeites’ was coined in 1884).” —Times Literary Supplement

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