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The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
See Section "V" for Vampires.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy : Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale Twenty-three essays by young professional philosophers examine crucial ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Buffyverse (the world of Buffy). Though the show already attracted much scholarly attention, this is the first book to fully disinter the intellectual issues. Designed by Whedon as a multilevel story with most of its meanings deeply buried in heaps of heavy irony, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has replaced The X-Files as the show that explains to Americans the nature of the powerful forces of evil continually threatening to surge into our world of everyday decency and overwhelm it. In the tradition of the classic horror films Buffy the Vampire Slayer addresses ethical issues that have long fascinated audiences. This book draws out the ethical and metaphysical lessons from a pop-culture phenomenon.
Celluloid Vampires : Life after Death in the Modern World In 1896, French magician and filmmaker George Méliès brought forth the first celluloid vampire in his film Le Manoir du Diable. The vampire continues to be one of film's most popular gothic monsters and in fact, today more people become acquainted with the vampire through film than through literature, such as Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. How has this long legacy of celluloid vampires affected our understanding of vampire mythology? And how has the vampire morphed from its folkloric and literary origins? In this entertaining and absorbing work, Stacey Abbott challenges the conventional interpretation of vampire mythology and argues that the medium of film has completely reinvented the vampire archetype. Rather than representing the primitive and folkloric, the vampire has come to embody the very experience of modernity. No longer in a cape and coffin, today's vampire resides in major cities, listens to punk music, embraces technology, and adapts to any situation. Sometimes she's even female. With case studies of vampire classics such as Nosferatu, Martin, Blade, and Habit, the author traces the evolution of the American vampire film, arguing that vampires are more than just blood-drinking monsters; they reflect the cultural and social climate of the societies that produce them, especially during times of intense change and modernization. Abbott also explores how independent filmmaking techniques, special effects makeup, and the stunning and ultramodern computer-generated effects of recent films have affected the representation of the vampire in film.
Critical Insights: Good and Evil: Revisiting the Gothic: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel as Contemporary Gothic Good and evil have existed throughout human history, and humanity has been attempting to come to grips with the idea of them for just as long. From allegorical morality tales to cathartic horror stories to all-too-real personal narratives of unspeakable events, literature has always provided an especially powerful medium for the study of good and evil. this volume explores the theme in such works as King Lear, Maus, Jane Eyre, and the Harry Potter series.
Dracula - Bram Stoker Since its publication in 1897, Bram Stoker's Dracula has never been out of print. Within the narrative's recesses--its vaults, coffins, cells, mansions--Stoker captures and inventories a host of anxieties and concerns, from the rise of a new media ecology to the status of women. This invaluable new study guide contains a selection of the finest contemporary criticism of Stoker's legendary horror novel.
Dracula and Philosophy : Dying to Know In Dracula and Philosophy 24 nocturnal philosophers stake out and vivisect Dracula from many angles. John C. Altmann decides whether Dracula can really be blamed for his crimes, since it's his nature as a vampire to behave a certain way. Robert Arp argues that Dracula's addiction to live human blood dooms him to perpetual frustration and misery. John V. Karavitis sees Dracula as a Randian individual pitted against the Marxist collective. Greg Littmann maintains that if we disapprove of Dracula's behavior, we ought to be vegetarians. James Edwin Mahon uses the example of Dracula to resolve nagging problems about the desirability of immortality. Adam Barkman and Michael Versteeg ponder what it would really feel like to be Dracula, and thereby shed some light on the nature of consciousness. Robert Vuckovich looks at the sexual morality of Dracula and other characters in the Dracula saga. Ariane de Waal explains that "Dragula" is scary because every time this being appears, it causes "gender trouble." And Cari Callis demonstrates that the Count is really the Jungian Shadow archetype -- with added Shapeshifter elements -- in the journey of Mina Harker, heroine/victim of Stoker's novel, from silly girl to empowered woman.
Novels into Film: I Am Legend With 100 concise essays on significant novels and movie adaptations, ranging from classics to contemporary favorites, this new Salem edition will appeal to students of literature and film, not to mention movie lovers from every walk of life. This reference work brings value to students and teachers at the high school and undergraduate levels, and the essays can be used to complement individual or classroom study.
Supernatural Literature
See the section on Vampires. Covers Dracula, Twilight and more.
Undead Souths : The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revived by Native Americans forcibly removed from the American Southeast. To capture the manifold forms of southern haunting and horror, Undead Souths explores a variety of media and historical periods, establishes cultural crossings between the South and other regions within and outside of the U.S., and employs diverse theoretical and critical approaches. The result is an engaging and inclusive collection that chronicles the enduring connection between southern culture and the refusal of the dead to stay dead.
The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History Showing how vampire-like creatures organically formed in virtually every part of the world, The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History examines the historic, societal, and psychological role the vampire has played - and continues to play - in understanding death, man's deepest desires, and human pathologies.
Vampires, Burial, and Death : Folklore and Reality In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading. "This study's comprehensiveness and the author's bone-dry wit make this compelling reading, not just for folklorists, but for anyone interested in a time when the dead wouldn't stay dead."-Booklist "Barber's inquiry into vampires, fact and fiction, is a gem in the literature of debunking [and] a convincing exercise in mental archaeology."-Roy Porter, Nature "A splendid book about the undead, illuminated by the findings of morbid anatomy . The main value of this most interesting book is to remind us how far we have come in our ability to explain the world and how this has released us from at least some terrors."-Anthony Daniels, Spectator "This book is fascinating reading for physicians and anthropologists as well as anyone interested in folklore."-R. Ted Steinbock, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association "A fascinating and pain-staking (sorry!) thesis, which welds together folklore, epidemic panic, communal stupidity, and forensic and funereal science."-Huw Knight, New Scientist
Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods The figure of the vampire serves as both object and mode of analysis for more than a century of Hollywood filmmaking. Never dying, shifting shape and moving at unnatural speed, as the vampire renews itself by drinking victims' blood, so too does Hollywood renew itself by consuming foreign styles and talent, moving to overseas locations, and proliferating in new guises. In Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods, Dale Hudson explores the movement of transnational Hollywood's vampires, between low-budget quickies and high-budget franchises, as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas and off-shores to Canada, Philippines, and South Africa. As the vampire's popularity has swelled, vampire film and television has engaged with changing discourses around race and identity not always addressed in realist modes. Here, teen vampires comfort misunderstood youth, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover their repressed histories. Looking at contemporary hits like True Blood, Twilight, Underworld and The Strain, classics such as Universal's Dracula and Drácula, and miscegenation melodramas like The Cheat and The Sheik, the book reconfigures Hollywood historiography and tradition as fundamentally transnational, offering fresh interpretations of vampire media as trans-genre sites for political contestation.
Vampires : Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil In the modern world vampires come in all forms: they can be perpetrators or victims, metaphors or monsters, scapegoats for sinfulness or mirrors of our own evil. What becomes obvious from the scope of the fifteen essays in this collection is that vampires have infiltrated just about every area of popular culture and consciousness. In fact, the way that vampires are depicted in all types of media is often a telling signifier of the fears and expectations of a culture or community and the way that it perceives itself; and others. The volume's essays offer a fascinating insight into both vampires themselves and the cultures that envisage them.
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy : New Life for the Undead Since 1968's Night of the Living Dead, zombie culture has steadily limped and clawed its way into the center of popular culture. Today, zombies and vampires have taken over TV shows, comic books, cartoons, video games, and movies. Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy drags the theories of famous philosophers like Socrates and Descartes into the territory of the undead, exploring questions like: Why do vampires and vegetarians share a similar worldview? Why is understanding zombies the key to health care reform? And what does "healthy in mind and body" mean for vampires and zombies? Answers to these questions and more await readers brave enough to make this fun, philosophical foray into the undead.

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Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker's Fiction and its Cultural Context Beyond Dracula represents an important critical departure from the customary psychoanalytical approach to the writings of Bram Stoker. Reading Stoker as a participant in Victorian and Edwardian cultural life, the volume examines the breadth of Stoker's novel-length fiction, as well as his journalism, biographical writings and short fiction. In its considerations of questions of religion, censorship, gender and medicine, the volume will interest not merely readers of the Gothic but those involved in the study of Victorian and Edwardian culture.
Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red beard -- a Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except for Dracula, which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and transformations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Whistler, Gladstone, and Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's life -- a real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that the Baltimore Sun called "superb, " Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his vampire tale, and the political, occult, cultural, and sexual background of the 1890's.
Encyclopedia of the Vampire An exhaustive work covering the full range of topics relating to vampires, including literature, film and television, and folklore. * Nearly 240 A-Z entries on all aspects of vampirism * Photographs and illustrations of vampire films, television shows, and other matters relating to vampires * Brief bibliographies referring the reader to secondary sources on individual entries * A general bibliography of scholarship on vampires
The Rise of the Vampire Before Bella and Edward; Stefan and Damon Salvatore; and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, there was Lestat and Louis, The Lost Boys, and Buffy Summers. Before True Blood and Let the Right One In, there was Dark Shadows and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. And then there is the most prominent of them all: Dracula, immortalized by Bram Stoker in 1897. Whether they're evil, bloodsucking monsters or sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight, vampires have been capturing our imagination since their modest beginnings in the rustic fantasies of southeastern Europe in the early eighteenth century. Today, they're everywhere, appearing even in movies in Japan and Korea and in reggae music in Jamaica and South Africa. Why have vampires gone viral in recent years?   In The Rise of the Vampire, Erik Butler seeks to explain our enduring fascination with the creatures of the night. Exploring why a being of humble origins has achieved success of such monstrous proportions, Butler considers the vampire in myth, literature, film, journalism, political cartoons, music, television, and video games. He describes how and why they have come to give expression to the darker side of human life--though vampires evoke age-old mystery, they also embody many of the uncertainties of the modern world. Butler also ponders the role global markets and digital technology have played in making vampires a worldwide phenomenon.   Whether you're a fan of classic vampire tales or new additions to the mythology, The Rise of the Vampire is a fascinating look at our collective obsession with the undead.
True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things With You The first look at the philosophical issues behind CharlaineHarris's New York Times bestsellers The Southern VampireMysteries and the True Blood television series Teeming with complex, mythical characters in the shape ofvampires, telepaths, shapeshifters, and the like, TrueBlood, the popular HBO series adapted from Charlaine Harris'sbestselling The Southern Vampire Mysteries, has a richcollection of themes to explore, from sex and romance to bigotryand violence to death and immortality. The goings-on in themythical town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, where vampires satiate theirblood lust and openly commingle with ordinary humans, present noshortages of juicy metaphysical morsels to sink your teethinto. Now True Blood and Philosophy calls on the minds of someof history's great thinkers to perform some philosophicalbloodletting on such topics as Sookie and the metaphysics ofmindreading; Maryann and sacrificial religion; werewolves,shapeshifters and personal identity; vampire politics, evil,desire, and much more. The first book to explore the philosophical issues and themesbehind the True Blood novels and television series Adds a new dimension to your understanding of True Bloodcharacters and themes The perfect companion to the start of the third season on HBOand the release of the second season on DVD Smart and entertaining, True Blood and Philosophyprovides food?or blood?for thought, and a fun, new wayto look at the series.
Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality The first look at the philosophy behind Stephenie Meyer'sbestselling Twilight series Bella and Edward, and their family and friends, have facedcountless dangers and philosophical dilemmas in Stephenie Meyer'sTwilight novels. This book is the first to explore them,drawing on the wisdom of philosophical heavyweights to answeressential questions such as: What do the struggles of "vegetarian"vampires who control their biological urge for human blood sayabout free will? Are vampires morally absolved if they kill onlyanimals and not people? From a feminist perspective, is Edward aromantic hero or is he just a stalker? Is Jacob "better" for Bellathan Edward? As absorbing as the Meyer novels themselves, Twilight andPhilosophy: Gives you a new perspective on Twilight characters,storylines, and themes Helps you gain fresh insights into the Twilight novelsand movies Features an irresistible combination of vampires, romance, andphilosophy Twilight and Philosophy is a must-have companion forevery Twilight fan, whether you're new to the series or havefollowed it since the beginning.
The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature 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.