The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature
Publication Year: 1988
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Chapter One: Blood, Eroticism, and the Twentieth-Century Vampire
Sterling O'Blivion, a character in the 1984 I, Vampire by Jody Scott, introduces herself with a bizarre confession: "To remain young and adorable, I must drink six ounces of human arterial blood once a month. This is not an ethical choice. I was born this way. If society wants to kill or cure me, that's not up to me."1 She adds that she has been like...
Chapter Two: The Origins of Modern Myth
In the last chapter we saw that the vampire is such a familiar character today that adolescent readers of comic books, devotees of serious literature, and watchers of late-night "Creature Features" can all recognize the family resemblances in vampires as diversified as Dracula (played as an urbane eighteenth-century gentleman by George Hamilton) in Love At First...
Chapter Three: The Vampire as Gothic Villain
Dracula. As Chapter One suggests, the name has practically become a synonym for vampire in the twentieth century. However, Bram Stoker's original character is a transitional figure that has links to both the hideous creature from folklore and the more appealing modern version in Love At First Bite, John Badham's Dracula, and the novels of Fred Saberhagen...
Chapter Four: Suspicions Confirmed, Suspicions Denied
Rupert Sent Leger, protagonist and chief narrator of Bram Stoker's The Lady of the Shroud (1909), writes in his journal about the visits of a mysterious woman. Attempting to discover whether or not she is a vampire, he analyzes her behavior according to what he has read and heard of these supernatural...
Chapter Five: Myth Becomes Metaphor in Realistic Fiction
The fictional works discussed in this chapter—Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch—use the vampire in more obviously metaphoric ways than the works discussed in the previous two chapters; and the difference is revealed most clearly by the fact that a character or characters uses the term "vampire" as a significant metaphor for destructive human...
Chapter Six: Making Sense of the Changes
This study of the vampire has focused on the changes the literary character has undergone in the past two hundred years, especially as those changes relate to an evolving sense of self and of one's relationships with others. Despite its necessary interest in the individual (the reading and writing of fiction being intensely individual pursuits—far more so...
E-ISBN-13: 9780299263836
E-ISBN-10: 0299263835
Print-ISBN-13: 9780879724252
Print-ISBN-10: 0879724250
Page Count: 212
Publication Year: 1988
OCLC Number: 839690460
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