Do Androids Dream of Anna Karenina?

In an age where the classic literary masterpieces have lost their cache, who would have thought that a book series based in the classics of Western literature would be a publishing mega-success?

Note: these classics are not your great-grandfather's classics, but no one seems to be complaining.

In 2009, Quirk Books launched Quirk Classics, a series of books which aims—in the words of their mission statement—"To enhance classic novels with pop culture phenomena." The books in this series intermingle "the work of classic literary masters with new scenes of horrific creatures and grue-some action."

Fortunately for the publishers, all of the works they blend are already in the public domain. Consequently, Quirk is free to publish them in whatever form they see fit—or perhaps more accurately, whatever form they see sales.

And they do.

The first volume in the series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, released in April of 2009, has become wildly popular. According to the Guardian, in a little over a year, over 50,000 copies have been sold in the UK—and 600,000 copies in the US.

In addition, a film version starring and produced by Natalie Portman is already in the works.

A few weeks ago, the latest installment in the series, Android Karenina, was released. According to the promotional materials for the book, "As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya." However, as with the other novels in the series, the book then takes a decidedly postmodern turn by having the four "live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls."

Leo Tolstoy believed that one could not add or delete sentences from his novels without a resultant change in meaning. One can safely assume that deleting large sections of the novel and replacing them with text from contemporary writer Ben H. Winters would probably horrify him.

But even though Tolstoy would not see the blending of his classic as preserving in some way the meaning of his novel, others might.

The contemporary critic Hans-Georg Gadamer believed that meaning is never exhausted by the intentions of the author—even if the author was Tolstoy. For Gadamer, interpretation of literary works from the past necessarily involves a dialogue with the present. One might argue then that "mashing-up" of classic voices from the past with ones from the present is the kind of dialogue that epitomizes the fusion of horizons that Gadamer believes is typical of productive understanding.

By bringing Tolstoy into dialogue with present concerns and interests, the Quirk Classics are literally doing the cultural work necessary for understanding the past.

Regardless of how these mash-up novels square up with their originals, they are bringing an entirely new audience to authors like Jane Austen and Tolstoy. What is also clear it that this new audience wants more of the present—and less of the past—in these classics.

For example, the first novel in the series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was 85 percent vintage Austen. Readers however complained that this was too much Austen—that they wanted more zombies in the novel. Let the monsters multiply.

Subsequent volumes correct this by straying further from the original.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), for example, maintains the plot lines of the original as well as many of the more well-known passages, but also replaces much more of the original text than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Estimates put over 40 percent of this mash-up novel as new material, which Publishers Weekly says replaces vintage Austen dialogue with "monsters, vulgarity, and violence."

Now that we know that people are interested in recombined classics, and that there is a legitimate way to make them dialogue in a significant way with present concerns and interests, why not expand efforts to mash-up the classics, particularly if we still believe that they are the centerpiece of a liberal education?

Harvard...