The Rise of the Vampire

Erik Butler

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781780235325
  9781780231105
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780231396
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Before Bella and Edward there were The Lost Boys and the gang in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Before True Blood came Dark Shadows and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Before them all there was the most famous vampire of all time: Count Dracula, immortalized by Bram Stoker in 1897. Whether characterized as urbane aristocrats, animalistic monsters or brooding teenagers, as creatures of the day or of the night, it seems vampires have captured the popular imagination for centuries. Today they are a worldwide phenomenon, featuring in everything from Jamaican reggae songs to Japanese and Korean horror films.

Why have vampires gone viral? In The Rise of the Vampire, Erik Butler explains our enduring fascination with the undead by examining folklore, literature, film, television, journalism and music. Although vampires evoke an age-old mystery, they also embody the uncertainties of the modern world: the superficial fulfillment of desires in a digital age and the anonymity of life in the global metropolis.

Whether you’re a fan of classic vampire tales or prefer the recent additions to the canon, 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