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.
I could probably have added more tags for authors mentioned, but decided I didn't want to add too many new tags to the database, so I tried to limit the new tags to works discussed at length in this book, by authors who describe themselves as romance authors/some of their work as romances, and who might reasonably be expected to turn up at some point in a future work to be added to the database.
Note that
Sections of Chap. 3 draw from an article, “Vampire Darcy: The Impossible Hero,” which was published by Wiley in The Journal of Popular Culture (53.4, 2020) (viii)
I've not given that a separate entry, as it makes less reference to romance novels/romance fiction, but it can be found at https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12941
---
as Joseph Crawford expertly articulates in The Twilight of the Gothic? Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance (2014), the critical commonplace that places Gothic and romance at odds is one that eschews their long historical association in favour of a conception of the Gothic that privileges terror, horror, violence and fear. With “the rise of the paranormal romance,” as Crawford asserts, “it has become possible to see the outlines of a different sort of history of Gothic fiction, one in which romance has always played a central role; and within this history the paranormal romance … may be less an aberration than a return to form” (2014, 5). In light of this context, the Austen-vampire mashup can be viewed as less of a literary oddity than as the most recent addition to the long history of paranormal romance. What’s more, as Crawford highlights, it is a history that itself includes significant contributions from Austen. (3)
---
it is not difficult to imagine a sympathetic vampire becoming a lovable one, and in turn, a vampire lover. This transition is central to what Debra Dudek calls a new era in vampire culture: “the Beloved Cycle” (2018, 2). The beloved vampire of the new millennium, in Dudek’s summation, evolves from the sympathetic vampire but is marked by a new capacity for “sustained, mutual love between a human and a vampire,” the kind of love the sympathetic vampire is only capable of fleetingly and/or erotically (2018, 14). This transition brings vampire literature into perfect alignment with Austenian romance. When Dudek elaborates to explain that moral thought and action in beloved vampire narratives stem from the love between human and vampire, and that this love inspires both “to reflect upon what it means to be good and to act in ways that promote good,” it is a comment easily transferable to describe the moral leanings of Austen’s very human brand of romance. Dudek’s remark also reaffirms how “the romantic vampire was only an exaggerated version of the romance hero, suited to a more hyperbolic retelling of what was still, essentially, the same story” (Crawford 2014, 65). The vampire, as an exaggerated form of the Byronic and alpha romantic hero, “is destructive only for as long as it remains unredeemed by love” (Crawford 2014, 83); ergo, in contemporary vampire romance, the moral capacity of love is heightened into something new, testing “the extremes to which love extends to an absolute other who embodies good and evil” (Dudek 2018, 2). (10)
---
As an urtext to paranormal Austen mashups, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its attendant mythology bestows a significant feminine tension. The feminist ideal presented by the Buffyverse is one that cashes in on slaying as a lonely feminine experience, one that defies normative social conventions and gender stereotypes. Paranormal Austen mashups, though, trade in love and marriage, ultimately reinforcing the prescribed social conventions that slayers of the Buffyverse defy. The two positions aren’t mutually exclusive—one can obviously be a feminist slayer and fall in love, as Buffy herself at times proves—but slayers of paranormal Austen romance are faced with a weighty dilemma: to kiss or to kill? Perhaps it’s not a very weighty one after all, for in the worlds of paranormal Austen, love and romance win out every time. But for the authors of these mashups, the tension between these potentially conflicting ideals of femininity is a delicate one to negotiate. (24)
---
The chapter on "To Kiss or Kill? Austen’s Vampire-Slaying Heroines" focuses on:
Austen, Jane, and Wayne Josephson. 2010. Emma and the Vampires. Naperville: Sourcebooks.
Gleason, Colleen. 2010. Northanger Castle. In Mary Balogh et al., Bespelling Jane Austen, 95–170. Don Mills: Harlequin.
O’Donnell, Tara. 2014. Fanny Price, Slayer of Vampires. PDF file. Los Gatos: Smashwords.
and
In each case, vampire slaying is used as a means to reinforce the humanity of love, to be relished in the mortal, earthly realm. It is a world from which vampires (of the evil variety) must be banished.
On one hand, in the grand scheme of things, this is rather conventional romance. Girl meets boy and vampire, slays the vampire, loves the boy, and they live happily ever after. [...] On the other hand, these mashups can be read as examples of postfeminist culture. (46)
---
That is to say, their particular ideals of femininity are not conquered by love, but rather perfected by it. They are empowered and live happily ever after. (47)
---
In the chapter on "Trouble in Paradise: Pride and Prejudice as Vampire Romance",
Beginning with Meyer’s Twilight as a foundational text, this chapter examines how successfully the hypermasculine and fiendish vampire of old is reconciled with Austenian romantic values in Amanda Grange’s Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (2009), Colette L. Saucier’s Pulse and Prejudice (2012) and Dearest Bloodiest Elizabeth (2015), and Regina Jeffers’ Vampire Darcy’s Desire (2009). Where Grange and Jeffers look to restore Mr. Darcy’s humanity as a way to restore the magic of human love, Saucier’s erotically charged novels allow Austen’s beloved heroine to explore the heady delights of vampire love, but ultimately, at a considerable cost. (51)
---
Finally, here's the abstract for the conclusion:
This conclusion considers the various ways in which Austen-vampire mashups reflect changing cultural conditions. First, they mark the collision of two colliding trends: romantic fiction’s turn to sex, and vampire fiction’s turn to love. Second, they respond to new romantic ideals that centralise sex as a necessary part of a satisfying romantic relationship (as opposed to its function as a symbol of love). Finally, despite their ostensibly Byronic tendencies, Austen-vampire mashups tend to aspire to the romantic ideal of confluent love, a model of love based upon the contingencies of emotional equality and mutual self-actualisation. The merging of Jane Austen and vampires, then, is a confluent union in itself, and a precise reflection of its time. (109)
Here's the abstract:
I could probably have added more tags for authors mentioned, but decided I didn't want to add too many new tags to the database, so I tried to limit the new tags to works discussed at length in this book, by authors who describe themselves as romance authors/some of their work as romances, and who might reasonably be expected to turn up at some point in a future work to be added to the database.
Note that
I've not given that a separate entry, as it makes less reference to romance novels/romance fiction, but it can be found at https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12941
---
---
---
---
The chapter on "To Kiss or Kill? Austen’s Vampire-Slaying Heroines" focuses on:
and
---
---
In the chapter on "Trouble in Paradise: Pride and Prejudice as Vampire Romance",
---
Finally, here's the abstract for the conclusion: