on order
Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film
Erik Butler
Camden House, 2010
"For the last three hundred years, fictions of the vampire have fed off anxieties about cultural continuity. Though commonly represented as a parasitic aggressor from without, the vampire is in fact a native of Europe, and its "metamorphoses," to quote Baudelaire, a distorted image of social transformation. Because the vampire grows strong whenever and wherever traditions weaken, its representations have multiplied with every political, economic, and technological revolution from the eighteenth century on..." -publisher
Contents
- 1 Introduction: Cultural Teratology
- 2 Vampire Country: Borders of Culture and Power in Central Europe
- 3 Vampires and Satire in the Enlightenment and Romanticism
- 4 The Bourgeois Vampire and Nineteenth-Century Identity Theft
- 5 Dracula: Vampiric Contagion in the Late Nineteenth Century
- 6 Vampirism, the Writing Cure, and Realpolitik: Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
- 7 Vampires in Weimar: Shades of History
- 8 Conclusion: The Vampire in the Americas and Beyond
- 9 Works Cited
- 10 Filmography
- 11 Index
from TLS
The long life of the vampire
How to recognize vampires, and how they spread their wings into the fictions of the Western world
Toby Lichtig
May 4 2011
Times Literary Supplement
"The vampire first sank its fangs into the British imagination in the early eighteenth century when accounts began to emerge from remote parts of Habsburg Europe of the superstitions of its recently colonized subjects. Austrian administrators, in control of new territory south of the Carpathians, encountered panic-stricken locals full of tales of the rapacious undead, of mysterious infirmities ravaging the peasants and suspicious coffins containing cadavers with fresh blood on their lips. Roger Luckhurst, in his introduction to the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, notes the notorious case of Peter Plogojowitz, in 1725, who “had been dead and buried for ten weeks” but was nonetheless blamed by villagers for a spate of sudden deaths, apparent strangulations. When the Imperial Provisor finally agreed to open the grave, lest the peasants “be obliged to forsake the village”, his delegation observed, along with “other wild signs”, a bloodied mouth, long fingernails and evidence of healthy skin on the corpse. The body was promptly staked through the heart and incinerated. While Luckhurst elucidates the sociological background to this event, noting that vampirism may flare “at times of political tyranny and in plague seasons”, it is Michael Sims, in Dracula’s Guest, who provides the rather more straightforward explanation for the gruesome apparition. Fingernails do not grow after death but the skin does shrink, “making the nails look abnormally long and clawlike”. Meanwhile, skin may appear flushed once the top layer is “sloughed off” and blood can pool around the facial cavities, especially if the body is placed face down. As for the unmentionable “other wild signs”, “the genitals often inflate during decomposition."...
continued