Images of the Modern Vampire


Book Description

In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Brodman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and Russian vampires in popular culture, and the vampire in contemporary novels, film and television. The essays in this collection continue that multi-cultural and multigeneric discussion by tracing the development of the post-modern vampire, in films ranging from Shadow of a Doubt to Blade, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Interview with the Vampire; the male and female vampires in the Twilight films, Sookie Stackhouse novels and TrueBlood television series; the vampire in African American women’s fiction, Anne Rice’s novels and in the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend; vampires in Japanese anime; and finally, to bring the volumes full circle, the presentation of a new Irish Dracula play, adapted from the novel and set in 1888.




Vampire Winter


Book Description

For vampire Blaine Kettridge, the cold, dark nuclear winter is the beginning of a new life--he can hunt and feed whenever he pleases, because it is always night




The Modern Vampire and Human Identity


Book Description

Vampires are back - and this time they want to be us, not drain us. This collection considers the recent phenomena of Twilight and True Blood, as well as authors such as Kim Newman and Matt Haig, films such as The Breed and Interview with the Vampire, and television programmes such as Being Human and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.




Desmond


Book Description

Desmond Beckwith is not a happy man. A financial wizard with an international investment empire, he's also in love with his lifelong-but-straight friend Roger. At forty-five, in spite of a circle of supportive friends and an elegant New York townhouse full of antiques, he feels isolated and cut off from humankind. And with good reason. Desmond Beckwith is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old vampire. For nearly two centuries he has lived in New York, looking vainly for love and seeking to satisfy his twin thirsts for blood and sex in those places where men of his kind have always met to find release and solace. Into Desmond's sheltered, lonely world stumbles Tony Chapman, an unemployed museum curator, down on his luck and one step away from being out on the streets. Brutalized by the unforgiving nature of New York City, Tony is on the edge of despair when he meets this darkly handsome older man in the smoky dimness of a Greenwich Village bar. To their mutual astonishment, Tony proceeds to turn Desmond's protected little world on its head, and to unlock pieces of Desmond's past lives and loves that were deeply buried in Desmond's memory.




Vampires Today


Book Description

This book explores the modern world of vampirism. Based on interviews, it looks at the many expressions of vampirism, from lifestyle vampires, who adopt the culture and admire the gothic image, to 'real' vampires who believe they are a separate race and need to consume blood and psychic energy in order to survive.




From Demons to Dracula


Book Description

In blood-soaked lore handed down the centuries, the vampire is a monster of endless fascination: from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this seductive lover of blood haunts popular culture and inhabits our darkest imaginings. The cultural history of the vampire is a rich and varied tale that is now ably documented in From Demons to Dracula, a compelling study of the vampire myth that reveals why this creature of the undead fascinates us so. Beresford’s chronicle roams from the mountains of Eastern Europe to the foggy streets of Victorian England to Hollywood, as he investigates the portrayal of the vampire in history, literature, and art. Opening with the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, and his status as a national hero in Romania, he endeavors to winnow out truths from the complex legend and folklore. From Demons to Dracula tracks the evolution of the vampire as an icon and supernatural creature, drawing on classical Greek and Roman myths, witch trials and medieval plagues, Gothic literature, and even contemporary works such as Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Beresford also looks at the widespread impact of screen vampires from television shows, classic movies starring Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and more recent films such as Underworld and Blade. Whether as a demon of the underworld or a light-fearing hunter of humans, the vampire has endured through the centuries, the book reveals, as powerfully symbolic figure for human concerns with life, death, and the afterlife. A wide-ranging and engrossing chronicle, From Demons to Dracula casts this blood-thirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complex and telling totem of our nightmares, real and imagined.




Fanpires


Book Description

This collection of essays addresses the renewed interest in the cultural resurgence of the vampire, evident across a broad range of literature, film, television, graphic novels, and games. The appeal of vampire mythology and its associated folklore for modern audiences is examined in an age characterized by the transformative possibilities of the internet with both its low barriers to artistic expression and the erosion of the boundaries between author and audience in terms of the construction of narrative, character and fictional universes. This collection examines how audiences respond to and "use" the vampire in their own practices. From evil villains to tragic heroes, modern appropriations of the vampire, evident in popular manifestations such as the Twilight saga and the televisual adaptation of The Southern Vampire Mysteries (True Blood) are noted for their focus on the everyday. These vampires are found nested within communities, seeking to temper their urges and coexist with humans. "Drifting silently into harbour, the vampires arrived in Western Europe scarcely two centuries ago. Since then, they have become a new folklore. The rich fan cultures addressed by vibrant emerging scholars from around the English-speaking world gathered in Schott and Moffatt's collection are the true heirs of this uncanny invasion. The mix of glamour and disgust, aestheticism and dread vampires evoke offers metaphors for every form of anxiety and unholy yearning: a bloodstained laboratory for social experiment. This collection opens new corridors into the chambers of the undead, and casts an eerie light on the subterranean worlds of fans and vampires alike." -Sean Cubitt, Professor of Global Media and Communication, Winchester School of Art, UK. "Fanpires offers the preeminent collection of scholarly approaches to this immortal shape shifter. This compilation of insightful essays not only reflects the omnipresence of the vampire in popular culture, but it identifies the pivotal role of fans in revitalizing the life of the vampire." -Wendy Haslem, Professor of Screen Studies & Cultural Management, The University of Melbourne.




Fangs


Book Description

Vampires are hot in the YA market. Year after year, there's a new crop of successful novels, TV shows, and movies. This book, tongue firmly in cheek, addresses the teen who wants to be a vampire, or secrets hopes that he or she already is--with fashion, dating, and lifestyle tips for the 21st century bloodsuckers (hint: capes are so last millennium). Written for the teen who loves vampires and secretly wants to be one (or suspects they may already have been bitten), this stylish, humorous guide gives a history of the vampire myth, to-do lists of movies to watch and places to visit, and all-important fashion and makeup tips for the aspiring vampire.




The Vampire


Book Description

An authoritative new history of the vampire, two hundred years after it first appeared on the literary scene Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori’s publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom’s detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind’s fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.




The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature


Book Description

Prominent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.