The Rise of the Vampire

Erik Butler

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780235325, 9781780231105
• eBook ISBN: 9781780231396
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

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.

REFERENCES

Introduction: The Mystery and Mystique of the Vampire

1 Books catering to this appetite are numerous. Arlene Russo, Vampire Nation (Woodbury, MN, 2008), probably provides as good a place as any to start. Michelle A. Belanger, Vampires in Their Own Words: An Anthology of Vampire Voices (Woodbury, MN, 2007) lets self-professed vampires tell their own stories; the same author offers practical instruction for parties interested in this ‘spiritual path’ in The Psychic Vampire Codex: A Manual of Magick and Energy Work (San Francisco, CA, 2004). There are also many critical assessments and journalistic ‘exposés’ of contemporary vampire culture, for example, Katherine Ramsland, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today (NewYork, 1998).

2 Peter Mario Kreuter, ‘The Name of the Vampire: Some Reflections on Current Linguistic Theories on the Etymology of the Word Vampire’, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Peter Day (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 57–63.

3 Quoted in Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death (New Haven, CT, 1988), pp. 5–7.

4 For example, Mark Collins Jenkins, Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend (Washington, DC, 2011).

5 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (NewYork, 1969), pp. 61–71.

6 On popular and literary traditions about hajduks in their native territory, see Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. IV: Types and Stereotypes (Amsterdam, 2010), pp. 407–40.

7 Reprinted in Klaus Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet: Kommentierte Dokumentation zum Vampirismus, 1689–1791 (Vienna, 1992), pp. 49–54.

8 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, in The Brontës: Three Great Novels (London, 1995), p. 222.

9 Augustin Calmet, Dissertation sur les vampires (Grenoble, 1998), p. 29.

10 Ibid., p. 30.

11 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (NewYork, 1967), pp. 90–192, for a discussion of how religious authorities viewed alleged instances of witchcraft; a century later, the same combination of credulousness and disbelief recurred in vampire mania.

12 Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet, p. 112.

13 E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, ed., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 24–5.

14 Milan V. Dimic, ‘Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century: The Other Side of Enlightenment’, in Man and Nature/L’Homme et la nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, III, ed. R. J. Merrett (Edmonton, 1984), p. 17.

15 Ibid.

16 John Polidori, Polidori’s Vampire, ed. Darrel Schweitzer (Doylestown, PA, 2002), p. 15.

17 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

18 Ibid., p. 15.

19 Ibid., pp. 18–19.

20 Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford, 1993), p. 246.

21 Ibid., p. 259.

22 Ibid., p. 264.

23 Ibid., p. 255.

24 Ibid., pp. 315, 317 and 318. In the course of the story, the reader learns that the vampire was previously resurrected – to another girl’s detriment – as ‘Millarca’, too.

25 Ibid., p. 278.

26 Ibid., p. 266.

27 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Ontario, CA, 1998), p. 52.

28 Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, XXXIII/4 (1990), pp. 621–45.

29 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Philip Horne (NewYork, 2010), p. 153.

30 Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Bowling Green, KY, 1988), discusses Dickens throughout.

31 See the essays collected in Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller, Jewish Presences in English Literature (Montreal, 1990).

32 The numerous points of tangency between these two figures are discussed by Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 16–48. See also, Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT, 2000).

33 See Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood (Urbana, IL, 2001).

34 Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula (NewYork, 2002).

ONE: Portrait Gallery of the Undead

1 The words are from Carol...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Mystery and Mystique of the Vampire
• ONE: Portrait Gallery of the Undead
• TWO: Generation V
• THREE: All-American Vampires (and Zombies)
• FOUR: That Sucking Sound
• FIVE: The Key to Immortality
• Conclusion: Vampires, Inside and Out
• REFERENCES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX