Austen’s Sub-continental Fans: A Comparative Study of Pride and Prejudice’s Fan Fiction from Pakistan and India

Abstract

This paper compares and analyzes Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable (2019) and Sonali Dev’s Pride and Prejudice and Other Flavors (2019) both loosely based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). Labeling both Kamal and Dev as Austen’s Sub-continental fans the paper closely reads their works in relation with fan fiction theory. The hallmark features of fan fiction, collected by Hellekson and Busse (2014) in their edited essay collection spanning over the ideas of the leading theorists and critics of the expanding field of Fan Fiction Studies, help establish both the novels as emblems of Kamal’s and Dev’s status of being the pioneering Sub-continental fans of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Both novels depict their respective protagonists situated in a social background similar to that of Austen’s time and explore how social conditions influence a female’s psychological structure and anxiety towards marriage.