The legend of the vampire has been one of the most widespread legends. In the breaking dawn of the new millennium, with its rapid and global information dissemination, a new upsurge of interest around these legendary creatures has been noted. The figure of the vampire, one of the most significant motifs, if not the main motif, in gothic literature deriving from folk tradition, has become widely known though literature and has lately found its way into many and various screenplays, notably cinema films and television series.
The book in hand comes as a natural sequel to The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, by the same editors. Its main subject is vampire imagery in postmodern times, as seen in relatively new works. It consists of sixteen essays, divided into three parts, examining, more or less, the “evolution” of vampires in relation to novels and plays of the past.
Part One, The Vampire in Modern Film, begins with “Reflecting Dracula.” Victoria Williams examines the (vampiric) “roles of lover and giver of life” (7) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, but also the “way in which patriarchy deadens women” (11). In “A Species of One” Murray Leeder explores atavistic degeneration and criminality in the protagonists of two films (one not so well known); under the scope of criminology theories these atavistic vampires are seen as “living fossils” (18) unable to keep up with man’s evolution. In “Dracula the Anti-Christ” Melisa Olson explores the symbiotic development of views about Jewishness and vampirism; anti-Semitic stereotypes, already evident in Dracula, vividly re-emerged in the film Dracula 2000. Simon Bacon in “Eat Me!” presents an interestingly “symbiotic” (41) connection between the consumer’s and the desired food’s nature, on the “You are what you are eaten by” (43) basis, and views the vampire as a reflection of an alienated otherness, the one we need in order to define ourselves.
Part Two, Race, Gender and the Vampire, begins with “The Madonna and Child” by Donna Mitchel. The author examines, mainly under a psychoanalytic lens, the place and longing of the female in the patriarchal society of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and gothic literature in general, through the complex and ever-shifting familiar roles of the two major but “forgotten” female characters of the novels in relation/comparison to male characters. Karin Hirmer in “Female Empowerment” explores female power and control in new vampire productions such as Buffy and True Blood, which introduce better film quality and also more “next door” and sympathetic types of vampires. In “Lightening ‘The White Man’s Burden’” by Cheyenne Mathews, the “savage” vampire in Bram Stoker’s novel, opposed to white upper-class society, becomes, in Richard Matheson’s modern novel, a symbol of humanity’s decadence but also a proletarian power, according to Marx, trying to eradicate class antagonism. Zélie Asava, in “‘You’re Nothing to Me But Another… [White] Vampire,’” explores race and gender issues in two major mainstream characters, Blade from the Blade Trilogy and Akasha from Queen of the Damned (also inspired by Anne Rice’s novels); utilizing race, gender, as well as queer studies, the writer notes the uniqueness of these characters in terms of ethnic and sexual attitude, as they demonstrate a freedom previously unusual in Hollywood’s “white male cultural hegemony” (111). In “’She Would Be No Man’s Property Ever Again’” Marie-Luise Loeffler argues for the symbolic potential of recent African-American vampire fiction in demonstrating unspoken issues of black slavery and in signifying a resistance against white/colonial dominant social structure. Loeffler uses the example of Blood Lust, a vampire novel by J. M. Jeffries (pseudonym for J. Hamilton and M. Pace), which provides a transhistorical framework for the “narrative trajectory unprecedented in the literature of slavery by black women” (122).
Part Three, New Readings of the Vampire, starts with “Blood-Abstinent Vampires” by Alaina Christensen, where the aspect of vampires as a “sexy consumer object” (131) is explored, particularly through the application of Jean Baudrillard’s theories about sign value in a consumer society to the presentation of male “vegetarian” vampires’ bodies in the Twilight Saga, as the (female) fans’ urge to “consume” these bodies is linked to many aspects of contemporary cultural milieu. Ben Murnane, in “‘Exactly My Brand of Heroin,’” explores the impact of the Twilight series on broader culture, as previously marginalized vampires, closely associated with “two of the only constants in life: sex and death” (150), become the “centre of mainstream fantasy” (157). In “Disciplinary Lessons” Hope Jennings and Christine Wilson criticize Twilight’s rewriting of the Genesis myth as “another confusing and misleading spin on consensual sexual relationships” (163), since it promotes, according to the writers, girls’ adhesion to a system that disciplines their desires (172). In “Vampire Vogue and Female Fashion” Sarah Heaton analyzes the “complex relationship” (184) of skin and clothing for both vampires and humans alike in the Sookie Stackhouse and Twilight novels, and a “style conscious” (176) attempt to make vampires more human. Batia Poe Stolar, in “The Politics of Reproduction in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga,” explores the patrilineal act of creation in the Twilight novels as another aspect of “female subservience” (198). In “The Vampire from an Evolutionary Perspective in Japanese Animation,” Burcu Genç notes the way Blood+ breaks the boundaries between human and vampire societal hierarchy. In “Adapting Dracula to an Irish Context,” the editors of this volume present a theatrical prequel of Dracula in an Irish context, with Bram Stoker and actor/director Henry Irving, among others, as dramatis personae.
The variety of the volume’s essays offers an inside view on many known and not-so-well-known adaptations of the vampire legend. This book will surely be appreciated by anyone interested not only in modern vampire-lore but also in exploring multidisciplinary and thought-provoking approaches to the way present-day literature and media utilize vampire-related works.
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[Review length: 961 words • Review posted on September 24, 2014]