In 2009, Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Austen and Ben H. Winters's Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters launched a twenty-first-century fad: the Austen-monster-mashup. The Austen-monster-mashup adds monsters and terrifying plots to the text of an Austen novel, thus providing readers with an uncanny version of the source text. In part, this uncanniness stems from the adaptation's alternate universe—including worlds where zombies roam the English countryside or giant jellyfish attack folks on the coast. However, the monster-mashup's attention to horror and the supernatural cannot fully explain the alternate universe's eerie effect. The adaptations’ doppelgangers are largely responsi- ble for creating the unheimlich. As I argue in this chapter, a paired reading of an Austen novel and its monster-mashup double encourages readers to analyze how the adaptation's doppelgangers bring out and enhance charac- teristics found in the source text. In examining the monster-mashup as a form of adaptation, and specifically Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters as a text, this chapter explains what readers can learn from the monster deriva- tive about the Austen source text. To show instructors how this pedagogical approach works, the chapter concludes with a plan for teaching Sense and Sensibility and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters together; the chapter finally explores what students learn by making the transition from reading texts to creating their own adaptations.

The Austen-Monster-Mashup: “Something You’d Actually Want to Read”

When Quirk Classics published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the press facetiously claimed that it turned “a masterpiece of world literature into something that you’d actually want to read.” Critics hastily interpreted this joke as a serious attack on Austen's writing. For instance, Stephen Shapiro attests, “The aim of the new mash-up fiction like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) is to mock not just canonical literature but also the titles that are particularly beloved by women, who might allow their own emo- tional investment in Jane Austen to allow for learning the sense and sensibil- ity of zombie codes.” While critics of the monster-mashup have identified the subgenre as lowbrow hack writing aiming to disparage highbrow litera- ture, Ben Dew argues that Quirk “exploit[s] the comic potential of the divi- sion between these categories.”