Abstract
This thesis investigates the merging of nineteenth-century, female, British authors such as Jane
Austen and the Brontë sisters with Americanized monsters to expose the collective, cultural
anxieties of both historical moments. With the publication of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies in 2009, a new subgenre emerged that incorporated nineteenth-century text
with contemporary, American horror tropes. Drawing upon monster theory, Transatlantic
studies and neo-Victorian criticism, I will define my corpus of texts as neo-nineteenth-century
horror capriccios’. Chapter one focuses on how Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff’s ambiguous race is
rewritten with a vampiric embodiment in Sarah Gray’s Wuthering Bites which ultimately comments
on social status of people of colour. Chapter two explores the limitations of reclaiming the
female monster narrative in Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sherri Browning
Erwin’s Jane Slayre as the racial connotations of the zombie mythos challenge the rebellious spirit
of these protagonists. Chapter three argues that the sea monsters in Ben H. Winters’s Sense and
Sensibility and Sea Monsters represents class struggle and the continuous plight of the
disenfranchised group. In the final chapter, I will examine how Austen’s celebrity counteracts a
monstrous labelling in Janet Mullany’s Jane and the Damned and Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion, a
luxury her female predecessors and characters have not been afforded. These monstrous texts
highlight the political and social ideologies present in the original nineteenth-century works that
those twenty-first-century authors have exploited through Americanized monsters to comment
on contemporary cultural uncertainty. With each monster, a new facet of our collective angst is
revealed, allowing us to understand the landscape and the function of the American horror
genre.