“Now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem!” The Neo-Victorian novel-as-mashup and the limits of postmodern irony

de Bruin-Molé, Megen 2017. “Now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem!” The Neo-Victorian novel-as-mashup and the limits of postmodern irony. Kohlke, Marie-Luise and Gutleben, Christian, eds. Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions, Neo-Victorian Series, Amsterdam: Rodopi,

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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 postmodernism’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 problematic 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?

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PB Modern European Languages P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Publisher:	Rodopi
ISBN:	9789004336605
Last Modified:	19 Oct 2021 01:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/95090

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