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A Regency redundancy?
The world eagerly awaits "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," the Jane Austen mashup from Seth Grahame-Smith and Quirk Books. But Brad Pasenek, an English professor at the University of Virginia, says that Austen's most famous work is already a zombie novel, of sorts:
"The characters other than the protagonist are so often surrounded by people who aren't fully human, like machines that keep repeating the same things over and over again," Professor Pasanek said. "All those characters shuffling in and out of scenes, always frustrating the protagonists. It's a crowded but eerie landscape. What's wrong with those people? They don't dance well but move in jerky fits. Oh, they are headed this way!"
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Joshua Rothman is a graduate student and Teaching Fellow in the Harvard English department, and an Instructor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He teaches novels and political writing.
