Book Culture Mash-Up: Jane Austen Fight Club


Elizabeth Bluemle - August 9, 2010

A tidbit for a Monday morning: this very funny video re-imagining the world of Jane Austen if it included Fight Club. I am a sucker for a good mash-up (but there are very few really well-executed ones).

Jane Austen Fight Club
What children’s book mash-ups would you like to see? I’m thinking Babe the Gallant Pig / Top Chef. (Oh no I di’n’t!) Or how about Flowers for Algernon, where Charley meets The Runaway Dolls? (Hey, I never said they were good ideas.) Josie suggests Horton Hears a Who and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
What should the next YouTube book mash-up blockbuster be, hmm?

8 thoughts on “Book Culture Mash-Up: Jane Austen Fight Club

  1. Fran

    Why is are things in publishing these days framed as war and “battles”? What are we teaching our young people if educators and role models are creating division in their words and ways to promote things? This vs That! “Battle of the Books”. Mash ups? Who cares!?! Stop! Enough. War on the outside reflects war on the inside. Better yet, look inside and see where the war is in our psychology first. Please do not bring it into the world and to us folks reading publishing blogs and to younger people. I found the video as violence couched in humor. Are we really that desensitized by our media and so war hungry and fight hungry that violence, war, torture is a joke? Not funny.

    Reply
    1. Peni Griffin

      I think Fran overlooks the latent violence in Jane Austen’s brand of humor, which can be pretty savage.
      However, my kidlit mashups would be pretty tame. You could get Winnie the Pooh, Sam Gamgee, Puzzle the Donkey, and Dorothy together for a picnic in the Wood Between the Worlds and they could have a really nice time.

      Reply
  2. shelftalker elizabeth

    Hi, Fran. Sorry to start your week on a bad note! What I find funny about this is the unexpected juxtaposition of Jane Austen — civility, genteel society, wit, banter — with Fight Club, that horrific institution. My mind is amused and intrigued by the unexpected, and the “mash-up” game is really about taking disparate elements and combining them to create surprise, and in that surprise rests (at least for me) the humor.

    Reply
  3. Miriam at Lee & Low Books

    Any Jane Austen with Ally Condie’s Matched—I think the two civil, chaste forms and expectations of courtship and family life would be really interesting.
    Kate Milford’s The Boneshaker with Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, largely because I am entertained by title cloning—but a spunky girl riding her bike around a Zombie-infested Seattle looking for the Devil, as a single mother tries to protect her son from itinerant medical salesmen peddling “cures”for zombie-ism… works for me!

    Reply

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