Related Papers
The Evolution of the Vampire in Popular Narrative from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
2019 •
Charmaine Tanti
The vampire is one of the most powerful and enduring archetypes handed down to us by nineteenth-century literature, and remains, arguably, the most popular manifestation of the undead in popular culture. Perhaps more than any other monster, the vampire is a reflection of humanity. As Nina Auerbach says in her seminal work, Our Vampire, Ourselves, every generation creates its own vampire. Vampires embody our deepest fears and wildest desires, they represent the past that refuses to remain buried, our anxieties in the face of unavoidable social change and our fear of social and ethnic Others. They are signifiers that expose what we wish to conceal. Some vampires seem to uphold the status quo and a rigid patriarchal system, others defy the social and moral orders by freeing repressed desires and latent sexualities and by embodying in their very being all that is hated and suppressed by socio-normativity. This paper will examine the evolution of the vampire in popular narrative, discuss...
Vampire Literature Review by Aaron J Clarke
2022 •
Aaron J . Clarke
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault put forward the “repression hypothesis” concerning, in the modern age, sexuality. I postulate that Gothic fiction is a significant breakout of this hypothesis by highlighting (with reference to the vampire) its sexual transgressiveness. In Gothic literature, the vampire is an immortal creature who must prey on mortals to maintain their undeadness. Since early vampire stories, the vampire’s predatory behaviour has acquired a connotation of transgressive sexuality. This creative practice aims to explore vampiric desire and its connection to the emotions of love and loss as well with a focus on the same-sex desire of which there are relatively few examples in Gothic vampire fiction. This literature review, therefore, gives more account of Foucault’s “repression hypothesis” and then surveys vampire fiction as a subgenre of the Gothic, touching upon its origins and vampiric folklore and how these fictional creatures stand for Otherness and symbolise sexual transgression. Then I examine a selection of Queer realist fiction from the 20th and 21st centuries that offer insight into the themes of love, loss, and desire. Foucault’s use of Plato’s treatise, Phaedrus, aids in looking at queer realist fiction as models for gay desire, love, and loss. The insights gained by investigating these themes will be applied creatively to write a Queer vampire novella, entitled Lautréamont that challenges the conventions of desire in the genre, and which will ‘remix’ historical vampire fiction with contemporary queer literature on love, loss, and longing.
Vampires are vampires because they love: The vampire's energy as a threat to the hierarchical distance of sanctioned relationships
Sophie Cherel
The vampires of Gothic literature present a challenge to the monologic reader. Coleridge's 'Christabel' and Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' are perfect examples of this. Rich in symbol and allegory, they offer themselves to an endless variety of interpretations and defy categorisation. There is no one correct meaning to be found in either: there is no one authoritative voice unifying the whole. 'Christabel' remains unfinished, as, to some extent, does 'Carmilla'. Since there is no conclusion, the texts cannot be wrapped in one neat package and forgotten on a shelf-an unfinished text is undead, like the vampire, and 'feeds' on other texts; its meaning, its lifeblood, depends on how it relates to what is outside it. The Gothic is by nature a subversive, parodying genre and its mode is ambiguity and intertextuality. 'Carmilla' and 'Christabel' derive their significance not from any inherently present 'answer', but rather from the questions they raise. By baffling our expectations, they show us our expectations. They hold a mirror up to the conventions of literature and in the glass, darkly, appear the very distortions inherent in our accepted way of thinking. Thus, they question standard notions of value and unbalance authority. They expose the arbitrariness behind our certainties and thereby open up new avenues of thinking. By presenting us with figures that resist classification, they show us the narrowness of usual categories and the failure of language to express the whole truth. "There is a selection of answers which could all be adequate to some degree, there are no answers which are unequivocally correct" 2. The vampire therefore works on two levels: textually, as the sharer whose intimacy shatters the fixedness of identity, and symbolically, as the text itself, which destroys any attempt at classification, remaining elusive to engage an intimacy with the reader, challenging him to his own, personal interpretation. The meaning of such a text is not created by the author alone. It resides in the interplay between text and reader, in the interaction of the specific with the general, in the changing position of the text within the field of discourse.
Vampire in Literature: Piety and Sacrilege
Diana Alexandra
This dissertation explores the ways in which vampire literature both upholds and challenges the orthodox values of the Western Christian world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The novels that are the focus of the dissertation are Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the first three novels in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988). The dissertation has five chapters: the Introduction, which focuses mostly on the general context of the novels. Chapter Two explores Dracula, analysing the themes of Good vs Evil, Biblical resonance, and women in the context of nineteenth-century England. Chapter Three is focused on Interview with the Vampire, explaining the evolution of the image of the vampire in the twentieth century, and exploring the themes of the existence of God, the meaning of Evil, and vampire consciousness. Chapter Four is comprised of The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, which are different novels, but the plot is continued from the former to the latter. For this reason, the themes of the new Gods, Christian inversions and gender roles are analysed using both novels simultaneously. The Conclusion to the dissertation is a brief summary of the main ideas that are explained throughout this thesis. The final conclusion to the research topic is that Dracula upholds the orthodox values of the Western Christian world of the nineteenth century, emphasising the concepts of Good and Evil as they are portrayed in the Bible, and showing the ongoing battle between God and Satan. The latter dichotomy is one of the core ideas of orthodox Christianity. It also highlights the perverted nature of the vampire, and the proper role of women in society. The Vampire Chronicles, on the other hand, challenge the orthodox values of the Western Christian world of the twentieth century, denying the existence of God, the evil nature of the vampire – who is elevated to a God himself –, and arguing that androgyny is a form of higher consciousness.
Moral Monster: The Literary Vampire
Kate Daley
Monstrous Males, Fatal Females: Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death
Fear Itself: The Vampire as Moral Panic
2020 •
Holly Walters
The vampire is a powerful symbol as well as a deeply intriguing metaphor for the collective fears and perspectives of the societies within which it dwells. Over the years, what began as a folktale of wandering spirits has accumulated a plethora of characteristics and interests which are now lumped together under the bricolage we now call ‘the vampire.’ Yet the figure of the vampire and the ways in which we draw upon it have undergone many transformations over time. However, it is precisely these transformations that reveal something about our own relationships to impurity, danger, and death today. Therefore, rather than addressing the symbol of the vampire as a relatively constant set of cross-cultural characteristics and meanings, this essay reflects on the differences in symbolic expression over time as they relate to culturally-rooted dread, distrust, and uncertainty. Following the foundations of the Western concept of the vampire, from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Europe, is a complex process. But not only does the vampire symbolize the anxieties a society has about itself, it also embodies myriad regional beliefs concerning evil, death, and damnation. To wit, a kind of perpetual moral panic in iconic form. It personifies the darkest aspects of life, the pain of disease, gendered oppression. questions of evil in nature, and the struggles against spiritual failure. Following the institutionalization of Christianity across much of Europe in the Middle Ages, the vampire mytheme then metamorphosed to become the modern vampire we recognize today; though it yet remains the repository of our deepest collective fears.
Proteus: A Journal of Ideas. 26.2, Fall 2009: 19-24
Conformity through transgression: the monstrous other and virtual vampires
Kirsten Stevens
The Contemporary Vampire as L'homme Fatal
Deborah Griggs
This paper examines themes of Eros in traditional vampire narratives. Discussed are the seminal 19th century texts by Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker; four major cinematic Stoker adaptations (Murnau, Herzog, Browning, Coppola); and the Sookie Stackhouse novels. The paper posits that "contemporary vampires inadvertently express a deeply disturbing poverty of Eros and a perhaps still subliminal horror of the externalization of identity and the materialism that are American consumerist society's primary values."
MOC1001 Vampire Fictions
Dr Ben Brabon
This first-year undergraduate module examines the cultural history of the vampire in prose fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Focusing each week on a key literary text – from classics such as Dracula, to popular contemporary manifestations such as Twilight – we will analyse the evolution of the vampire and what it represents within the historical and cultural contexts of each text studied. Adopting a range of critical lenses, from Marxist readings to Postcolonial approaches, we will chart the development of the vampire as a literary figure.
The Evolution of the Vampire Figure in English and American Literature as Social and Economic Symbol of Contemporary Western Masculine Identity
2016 •
Kristian Pérez Zurutuza
El vampiro ha fascinado a toda civilizacion como constructo cultural desde tiempos inmemoriales. Como imagen del lado oscuro de la naturaleza y del hombre, el mito se ha desarrollado incesantemente para explicar la psique humana a traves su propia existencia. Desde personificar la imagen de la naturaleza y su poder destructivo, hasta la construccion social de diversos ordenes del ser humano, el vampiro ha sabido resurgir con todo su vigor hasta nuestros dias. Esta Tesis se basa en la premisa de comprender el vampiro como la imagen de la masculinidad del hombre blanco occidental en su aspecto capitalista, analizando su construccion y evolucion dentro de la literatura gotica inglesa y americana en lengua inglesa. La critica marxista analiza el vampiro como elemento parasitario del capital dentro de la lucha de clases, pero esta Tesis ahonda en la imagen del vampiro como la construccion de la masculinidad del capital, o mejor dicho, del hombre occidental de raza blanca, bajo el supuest...
