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Reviewed by:
  • Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil
  • Carol A. Senf
Peter Day, ed. Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 243 pp.

This anthology has quite a remarkable pedigree, its parents being At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries publications (working in partnership with Rodopi) and the research project Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (www.wickedness.net). Indeed, it is the twenty-eighth volume in the interdisciplinary At the Boundaries series which, according to its website, "seeks to encourage and promote cutting edge inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary projects and inquiry" and bring together people "from differing contexts, disciplines, professions, and vocations" to encourage "conversations that are innovative, imaginative, and creatively interactive." Wickedness.net has a similar interdisciplinary aim to "foster a global dialogue capable of building a multi-layered picture of the problems and possible solutions encountered when dealing with evil and wickedness."

While children sometimes disappoint their parents, Vampires has succeeded in meeting both parents' interdisciplinary goals. Definitely interdisciplinary, it includes essays on important vampires in literature, such as Dracula and Carmilla , as well as material from linguistics, history, biology, psychology, and contemporary popular culture.

The volume is divided into two parts. Of these, part 1 focuses on the "Legend of the Vampire" and includes material on literature, the historical context, and fin de siecle art (primarily the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists). There are few surprises here. One would expect at least one essay on Stoker's Dracula, and Elizabeth Miller provides a careful overview of Stoker's sources. Ever scrupulous, Miller reminds readers that Stoker never went to Transylvania and that it is important to know the "general information about vampires that would have been available in the late nineteenth century" (3). Miller goes over material that she has covered elsewhere, but Day is right to use this careful essay as the opening essay. There are few surprises in any of the other essays in this section though all of the writers have been careful to read and integrate existing research on their topic, whatever it may be. People who have already read widely on the subject of the undead may be a bit surprised to find so little that is truly "cutting edge." The single quirky exception, "Vampire Dogs and Marsupial Hyenas: Fear, Myth, and the Tasmanian Tiger's Extinction" by Phil Bagust, introduces what to me is a genuinely new aspect of the vampire as a cultural icon. Indeed, Bagust demonstrates that the colonial landowners in New Zealand used vampire and werewolf superstitions to "ferment a long campaign of bloody persecution against the Thylacine" with the predictable result that the creature is now biologically extinct (95). Like the vampire of legend, however, it has "a strange 'second life' as a 'mystery animal'" (94). Not only do individuals occasionally claim that they have sighted the Tasmanian Tiger, but it has become an important symbol, appearing in tourist literature and on that state's license plates. Bagust's essay touches on everything from the cloning of extinct animals to people's continued need for mystery. A novel and thought-provoking essay, it prompted me to think about ways that various cultures have adapted traditional beliefs.

If part 1 offers much in the way of solid summary but little that is new and revolutionary, part 2, Vampires for the Modern Mind, is more likely to inspire [End Page 400] conversations in new, interdisciplinary areas. Although I would have expected to read at least one essay on both the novels of Anne Rice and on vampires in film, Stacey Abbot's essay, "Embracing the Metropolis: Urban Vampires in American Cinema of the 1980s and 90s," offers new insights into the differences in the vampires who occupy two entirely different urban areas, New York and Los Angeles. This brief summary does not do justice to the essay that also touches on race, gender, and the differences between the ways the vampire is depicted in Hollywood films versus independent films. I also learned about contemporary culture from "Vampire Subcultures" in which Meg Barker demonstrates how people today have adopted characteristics of the traditional vampire to explain their own psychological needs...

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