Books of the Dead : Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature

The zombie has cropped up in many forms―in film, in television, and as a cultural phenomenon in zombie walks and zombie awareness months―but few books have looked at what the zombie means in fiction. Tim Lanzendörfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendörfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brooks’s World War Z , Colson Whitehead’s Zone One , Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro,” Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead , and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendörfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right. Lanzendörfer contends that what zombies do is less important than what becomes possible when they are around. Indeed, they seem less interesting as metaphors for the various ways the world could end than they do as vehicles for how the world might exist in a different and often better form. "The zombie has cropped up in many forms--in film, in television, and as a cultural phenomenon in zombie walks and zombie awareness months--but few books have looked at what the zombie means in fiction. Tim Lanzendörfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendörfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brooks's World War Z, Colson Whitehead's Zone One, Junot Díaz's short story "Monstro," Robert Kirkman's comic series The Walking Dead, and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendörfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right. Lanzendörfer contends that what zombies do is less important than what becomes possible when they are around. Indeed, they seem less interesting as metaphors for the various ways the world could end than they do as vehicles for how the world might exist in a different and often better form."--Provided by publisher Cover Books of the Dead Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Zombie Fiction 1 Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War Conservative Armageddon and Liberal Postapocalypse 2 Pariah and Dying to Live Imagining Community after the Apocalypse 3 The Walking Dead and the Never-Ending Zombie Story The Everyday, Community, and the Need for an Ending 4 “So Many Unmentionables About” Parody, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and the Politics of Mash-up Fiction 5 Sadie and Allison in the Apocalypse Zombies and Gender 6 The Postracial, Postcapitalist Zombie Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” Coda Literature and the Contemporary Zombie | The Appropriate Monster Notes Bibliography Index