We’re delighted to welcome visiting international scholar Assistant Professor Eric Parisot (University of Adelaide, Australia) to the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies this November. He will be working with our Gothic postgraduates and offering a series of workshops.

Join us for this hybrid event drawing on work for Eric’s recently published book Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millenium (Palgrave, 2024). The paper will be followed by a Q and A. Refreshments will be available outside Lecture Theatre 5 before the event.

For those signing up for joining online, the Teams link will be emailed to you two days before the event and on the morning of the event as a reminder.

Austen Bites Back: Contesting Vampiric Feminism in post-Twilight Austen-Vampire Mashups

In this millennium, two of the most popular literary cults have converged: those of Jane Austen and the vampire. Spurred by the runaway commercial success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-08), fans have turned the worlds of Austen’s novels into a fantasy space for vampire romance—especially Pride and Prejudice. Some have fully embraced the erotic impulses of a vampiric Mr. Darcy. Others have sought to complicate this post-Twilight romantic fantasy. Amy Elizabeth Davis’ Darcy Bites: Pride and Prejudice with Fangs (2015) might even be said to write back to Meyer’s Twilight—itself inspired by Austen’s famous romance—to redress its potentially regressive and individualist feminism as an erroneous interpretation of Austen’s values. This paper will examine Davis’ Darcy Bites from this perspective, and especially the relationships of the novel’s women with vampirism. It questions vampirism as a form of female empowerment, and instead presents it as an obstacle to Austen’s feminist and romantic ideals. In doing so, Davis’ mashup might be said to self-reflexively renounce the very Austen-vampire trend of which it is part.

Eric Parisot is an Associate Professor in English at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia). His primary interests lie in British eighteenth-century literature and culture, especially related to death and suicide, the Gothic and the history of emotions. He is the author of Graveyard Poetry (Ashgate, 2013) and Jane Austen and Vampires (Palgrave, 2024), and co-editor of Graveyard Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2024). He is also the convenor of Flinders’ Horror and Gothic Group (HaGG).