Introduction: Reading Austen-Vampire Mashups

Since the global commercial success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), two of the most popular literary cults of the twenty-first century have converged: those of Jane Austen and the vampire. This chapter is an introduction to the resulting Austen-vampire mashup, a particular kind of paranormal, romantic Austen fan fiction. It considers this unlikely literary merging from a number of perspectives, including what they say about Austen’s relation to the Gothic, how the shifting cultural values of Austen and the vampire have aligned, what their articulation might mean for their respective contemporary legacies, and what they might say about the complexities of love, sex and romance in twenty-first-century culture. It also makes a case for reading so-called low-brow Austen fan fiction attentively, as literary texts, as a way to learn what Austen might now signify directly from her fans, and to gain meaningful insight into her changing contemporary relevance to love, sex, romance and womanhood.