Show Notes
What if the England of Pride & Prejudice was beset by a strange plague that brought the dead back to life to slaughter the living? What if young ladies were taught proficiency in sword play rather than playing the piano? And what if Elizabeth was a heartless, revenge driven, borderline sociopath?
Stefanie and Melinda discuss what happens when revisiting one of your favourite adaptations goes awry, and the painful hilarity of watching Hollywood go completely rogue on the film adaptation of a (sort of) classic novel in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith and its companion film, directed by Burr Steers.
Links & Mentions
The author's interview in The Times can be read in full here [https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/china/pride-and-prejudice-as-zombie-pulp-fiction-zjgwxs6llfp#:~:text=Yes%2C%20the%20LA%2Dbased%20television%20writer,placid%20villages%20of%2019th%2Dcentury%20England.]. Additional interviews used as sources can be found here on TIme.com [https://time.com/archive/6909850/pride-and-prejudice-now-with-zombies/], here on Entertainment Weekly [https://ew.com/article/2009/02/21/monster-mash-up/], and the author discusses reading everything Austen ever wrote here [https://directconversations.com/2016/02/05/interview-seth-grahame-smith-talks-pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies/#google_vignette].
More information on Isolationist Japan can be found here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku#:~:text=It%20is%20conventionally%20regarded%20that,to%20peace%20in%20the%20archipelago].
A brief history of ninja can be found here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja] - NB Stefanie uses the modern prefecture names only in this episode.
Emma Coffin's fantastic look at Orientalism ("Ninjas – Invisible in More Ways than One: Orientalism in Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [https://thegardenstatuary.com/archives/1998#:~:text=While%20the%20zombie%20plague%20portions,for%20the%20white%20British%20characters]") can be found here.
The more in-depth examination of costuming in PPZ that Stefanie references is here [https://plaidpetticoats.blogspot.com/2016/02/pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies-review.html]. While you can access the interview with the 2005 film costume designer Jacqueline Durran here on The Wayback Machine [https://web.archive.org/web/20090123122840/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3649828/How-I-undressed-Mr-Darcy.html], where she mentions that Joe Wright was desperate for any excuse to shift the temporal setting of the novel to avoid "unflattering empire waistlines".
You can read more about the religious piety aspect of PPZ, that we didn't have time to get into in the episode, here in the fabulously named "Piety and Pigs Brains" essay [https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-38-no-3/taylor/#:~:text=Wickham%20presents%20Lady%20Catherine%20with,might%20live%20together%20in%20England] on the JASNA website.
If you need subtitles or a transcript, these are available through Apple Podcasts. Please note, they are auto generated so we apologise in advance for it not correctly understanding our accents on certain words.
As always, you can find us (and our memes) on Instagram @janeaustenremixed [https://www.instagram.com/janeaustenremixed]and you can contact us via [email protected].
Join us every second Monday to hear all about a new adaptation of our favourite classic novel. Next episode we will be reading Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective by Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar. If you're reading along, we encourage you to buy secondhand or support your local independent bookshop, where possible.
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