a machine wrapped in a zombie and made apt by our circumstances…how long until we have a movie about zombie hedge fund analysts overtaking New York?

……………………………….

Most people try to ignore the fact that Austen’s novels are sort of acid baths. She’s so much better, deeper, more sensitive and intelligent than everyone around her that she has to regulate her own misanthropy. Her novels are hostile environments.

The characters other than the protagonist are so often surrounded by people who aren’t fully human, like machines that keep repeating the same things over and over again. All those characters shuffling in and out of scenes, always frustrating the protagonists. It’s a crowded but eerie landscape. What’s wrong with those people? They don’t dance well but move in jerky fits. Oh, they are headed this way!

—Brad Pasanek, a specialist in 18th-century literature at the University of Virginia on the archetype of zombies and Jane Austen

Zombies!

[Quoted Via: I Was a Regency Zombie, By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER; February 22, 2009]