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Jane Austen and vampires: Love, sex and immortality in the new millennium By EricParisot, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 2024. pp. 123. $65.95. (hbk)

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.13399

1540-5931

Yiting Fan,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Stimulated by the global commercial success of both Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (2005) and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), as well as their cinematic adaptations, many Austen fan fictions characterized by supernatural and Gothic monsters have emerged recently. Austen-vampire mashups are the most abundant, with nearly 30 related novels available on Amazon and Goodreads, constituting a cultural phenomenon. Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium (2024) is the first book to delve into the literary intersection of Jane Austen and vampires. Through a close and critical reading of Austen-vampire mashups, Eric Parisot has explored the innovative literary fusion from various angles, encompassing the transformation of cultural values inherent in this blending, its significance for literary legacies, and its impacts on love, sex, romance, and immortality in the twenty-first century. As a specialist in the literature and culture of the British long eighteenth century, the Gothic, literary responses to death, and the history of emotions, Parisot's studies on the Gothic poetics and sensibilities must have made excellent preparations for this latest project. Popular fan fiction has long been deemed short of depth and unworthy of serious consideration. Meanwhile, Austen-vampire mashups are often seen as low-brow adaptations having tarnished the purity of Austen as classics. However, different from other studies on Austen as popular culture, this monograph engages in various attitudes toward romance, love, and sex among contemporary women, positioning Austen-vampire mashups more significantly as a window into the zeitgeist. By straddling Austen with vampire, the Gothic, fan culture, and popular romance, this book consists of five chapters with a coherent framework and rigorous argumentation. In Introduction, Parisot offers a thorough exposition of the Austen-vampire fusion, its historical roots and evolution, affording readers a bird's eye view of this unique mashup phenomenon. Focusing on Austen-vampire mashups based on Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park, Chapter 2 analyzes how fan fictions transform the Austenian heroines into vampire slayers. By following the brilliant question about the tension of vampire slaying embodying both feminist action and heterosexual conservatism, Parisot suggests that portraying the heroine as a vampire slayer grants women independence and their rights to choose love and the future, thus achieving a "double entanglement" (47), materializing both "neo-conservative values" (47) and feminist liberation. Parisot further devotes the third chapter to the vampiric reinterpretations of Pride and Prejudice in Amanda Grange's Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (2009), Colette L. Saucier's Pulse and Prejudice (2012) and Dearest Bloodiest Elizabeth (2015), as well as Regina Jeffers' Vampire Darcy's Desire (2009). In Saucier, a costly "Faustian romantic fantasy" for Darcy and Elizabeth (66) highlights skepticism and the inherent dangers associated with the cultural erasure or repression of the monstrous origins of the literary vampire. On the contrary, Grange's and Jeffers' novels emphasize more the magic of human love as the greatness of mortal love by Elizabeth converts the vampire Darcy back into a human. Chapter 4 has addressed two novels that reimagine Austen as a vampire: Janet Mullany's Jane and the Damned (2010) and Michael Thomas Ford's Jane Bites Back (2010). Mullany's Austen, reborn in the 1797 Georgian England as a powerful and eternal vampire, ultimately rejects vampire life for the love of her family and artistic life. Living in contemporary America, Ford's Austen conceals her vampire nature and struggles against the public's misunderstanding and excessive commercialization of her works. In the final conclusive chapter, the characteristics of Austen-vampire mashups are summarized to include the increased explicit sexual depiction promoting "sex-positive feminism" (112), the protagonists' unconditional acceptance of their romantic partners shaping a template for contemporary ideal love, and the intricate romantic challenges that heterosexual women might confront in the twenty-first century. Notably, Jane Austen and Vampires as a wonderful cutting-edge study of popular Austen is an effective guide for today's readers, as critic Joseph Crawford celebrates such a combination of Austen and vampire as "far less unlikely than they might initially seem" ("Jane Austen and Vampires"). While Chapter 2 showcases the escalating tensions between the vampires and Austen's heroines many of whom are destined to serve as vampire slayers, symbolizing the inherent repulsion and profound differences between the themes of Jane Austen's classic novels and the world of vampires, Chapter 3 illuminates the interfacing between Austen and vampires by returning to love and humanity, transcending species distinction and achieving a profound converging of the two themes. Ultimately, in Chapter 4, mashup novels elevate their vision up to Jane Austen as a vampire, further shattering the barriers between the readers and the authors/Austen. As such, the vampire Austen witnesses embracing the offspring of her creations, while fan authors seek to express their revisions of Austen's most perfect forms, thereby preserving her iconic image while updating contemporary understandings of her. This book is then highly commendable because its materials encompass not just all of Austen's novels but an extensive range of fan fictions. By engaging more than 10 Austen vampire mashups, Parisot produces a first monograph of its kind to concentrate such a fascinating field to its unprecedented depth and breadth. This interdisciplinary study analyzes popular film and television series such as Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the beginning of each chapter. By leveraging the widespread reaches of new media, the book ingeniously facilitates readers' rapid understanding of the primary forms of mashup novels, paving the way for subsequent in-depth analyses. Most significantly, this project effectively integrates literature with reality. By its very nature, popular fiction boasts a wide range of audiences and thus maintains a close connection with reality. This book particularly examines the changes in contemporary views on love and romance by focusing on the adaptation of Austen-vampire mashups. Parisot also pays higher attention to women's preferences in contemporary marital and romantic relationships, such as the pursuit of personal choices as well as their open expression of sexual and social desires. By so doing, Parisot critiques the male sexual violence implied in Austen-vampire mashups. For example, some novels highlight the dreamy union between an Austen's heroine and a handsome vampire hero, but conceal the female loss of physical autonomy and immense emotional investment in the cross-species romances. However, some arguments are worth further discussing and rethinking. For instance, Parisot mentions the intention to register the love discourse of contemporary Austen fans yet fails to conduct a thorough analysis and research on who these Austen fans are, what their genders are, what social classes they belong to, and whether their ideas can be representative of the majority. With such subtle questions fully researched and expanded, this comprehensive current evaluation of Austen-vampire mashups engaging contemporary romantic views in society would be more convincing. In brief, scholars and readers interested in the eighteenth-century studies, Austen and popular culture should read it, in order to track down the latest interpretations and rewriting of modern masterpieces like Austen and gain insights into the zeitgeist. This monograph thus offers a delightful intellectual game for those who enjoy popular culture by deeply integrating popular cultural elements into literary and cultural classics. This research was supported by China National Social Science Fund for the project "Jane Austen's Novels and Modern Social Imaginaries Studies" (grant number 23BWW052).