“Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!”: The Neo-Victorian novel-as-mashup and the limits of postmodern irony
“Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!”: The Neo-Victorian novel-as-mashup and the limits of postmodern irony
This article situates the novel-as-mashup, first popularised by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), within twenty-first-century neo-Victorianism. Using several key examples of these mashup texts, it embarks on a discussion of post-modernism’s ironic nostalgia, exploring the limits of such irony through questions of hermeneutics and ethics that are currently relevant in the field of neo-Victorian studies. Is it possible to find any stable meaning (or meaningful irony) in a text that is made up of other texts? What happens when texts are wilfully or inadvertently misread, and how do we approach instances where misreading causes harm, or reproduces prob- lematic ideologies? Can texts that do not use the past seriously still be ironic, and if not, what does this mean for commercial, parodical genres like the novel-as-mashup?
humour, irony, literature, mashup, zombies, adaptation, Victorian
249-276
de Bruin-Molé, Megen
50c0d19d-e9c9-4ad4-9b14-8645139e1ef9
2017
de Bruin-Molé, Megen
50c0d19d-e9c9-4ad4-9b14-8645139e1ef9
de Bruin-Molé, Megen
(2017)
“Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!”: The Neo-Victorian novel-as-mashup and the limits of postmodern irony.
In,
Kohlke, Marie-Luise and Gutleben, Christian
(eds.)
Neo-Victorian Humour: The Rhetorics and Politics of Comedy, Irony and Parody.
(Neo-Victorian, 5)
Amsterdam.
Brill, .
(doi:10.1163/9789004336612_011).
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Abstract
This article situates the novel-as-mashup, first popularised by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), within twenty-first-century neo-Victorianism. Using several key examples of these mashup texts, it embarks on a discussion of post-modernism’s ironic nostalgia, exploring the limits of such irony through questions of hermeneutics and ethics that are currently relevant in the field of neo-Victorian studies. Is it possible to find any stable meaning (or meaningful irony) in a text that is made up of other texts? What happens when texts are wilfully or inadvertently misread, and how do we approach instances where misreading causes harm, or reproduces prob- lematic ideologies? Can texts that do not use the past seriously still be ironic, and if not, what does this mean for commercial, parodical genres like the novel-as-mashup?
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Published date: 2017
Keywords:
humour, irony, literature, mashup, zombies, adaptation, Victorian
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 416600
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/416600
ISSN: 2211-1018
PURE UUID: cdc85eca-1f1b-4a32-9b71-c48686a73ff0
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Date deposited: 03 Jan 2018 17:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 04:33
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Contributors
Editor:
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Editor:
Christian Gutleben
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