Literature has long been responsible for the representation of various conflicts that occupy the lives and minds of mankind during a given period in history. You don’t need an English degree to be familiar with some of the most common literary themes of written history, like love, friendship, war, heroes, revenge…

Of all of these, perhaps one of the most troubling conflicts for man is one that is at the forefront of our minds today: the fragile divide between life and death.

Like today’s popular obsession with zombies, the undead have been a constant presence throughout the history of literature as well. One of the earliest literary depictions of the zombie archetype exists in Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic romance novel Frankenstein. Shelley’s image of Frankenstein’s vile monster, made from the reanimated flesh of the dead, is a walking terror much akin to the zombies of today’s pop culture.

After the publication of Frankenstein, Bram Stoker took a shot at examining the undead with his own gothic horror novel, Dracula (1897). As one of the originals of the vampire literature genre, Dracula is another work that challenges the way we perceive and define life and death. Many gothic novels like those of Shelley and Stoker featured the walking dead as central features in their works, much like today’s mainstream zombie entertainment.

Centuries later, the question of the permanence of death has not left our minds. Entertainment centers around the undead, with many modern TV shows and movies set in a post-apocalyptic world crawling by zombies.

In response to this resurgence of walking dead in today’s pop culture entertainment, Zombie Studies is gaining popularity as a collegiate elective on campuses around the US. The chairman of the Southern Utah University English Department has even turned his zombie dissertation into a textbook: American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture.

Perhaps humankind is doomed to spend our living days both afraid of and fascinated by the dead. But is that so bad? We likereading zombie literature, watching zombie movies, and studying zombie theory; and we enjoy simultaneously preparing for the rise of the dead, just in case. As the conversation surrounding zombie culture continues, the best thing to do is stay on our toes!