Horrorizando a Jane Austen: del matrimonio, la muerte y la mujer de clase media.

In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published the novel "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic, turning one of the most well-known romantic novels of the Regency period into a horror novel, including unexpected plot turns, and transforming Austen’s smooth irony into a mordant satire about social classes at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Grahame-Smith’s novel achieved an extraordinary success in both the United States and Europe, thus becoming an outstanding paradigm of contemporary popular culture. This article offers a comparative study between both novels with a view to interpret the function and the outcome of introducing elements and characters pertaining to fantastic and horror literature in a literary classic, focusing on the economic discourse about marriage and the condition of middle-class women, as well as how this manifests through the metaphor of the so-called ‘unmentionable plague’ which sweeps away Regency England.