A historical journey in pursuit of the history, legend and lore of vampires. Where do they come from? Why do they have so much appeal today? As Twilight hits the book charts and billboards, and True Blood is on TV there are vampires in downtown clubs and never has it been more fashionable to be pale. M J Trow looks at the story of vampires and charts its origins a long way from the shopping mall in the story of the warrior prince, Vlad of Wallachia.
With the phenomenal success of the Twilight series and the popularity of shows like True Blood on HBO, vampires continue to be embedded in popular culture. Vampires have haunted readers and movie lovers for centuries and have been interpreted in every genre since. M. J. Trow charts the whole phenomena from its origins, depicting the story of warrior-prince Vlad of Wallachia (aka Dracula), who defended Europe against the Muslim invaders in fifteenth-century Europe.
An authoritative new history of the vampire, two hundred years after it first appeared on the literary scene Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori’s publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom’s detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind’s fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.
*Includes pictures *Includes historical accounts describing vampires *Discusses the legends of vampires across various cultures and the evolution of the folklore *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents People have always been afraid of the dead. Since the dawn of humanity, people have both cared for those who have deceased yet also tried to keep them away. There are a myriad of legends and beliefs about the dead coming back, and one of the more persistent ones is of the vampire. Everyone has heard of vampires, but few people are truly familiar with the history and folklore that have made the mythical beings so popular. Indeed, there are so many legends from so many cultures that it is difficult to come up with a hard definition, and folklore is by its very nature unscientific, but most people in the Western world think of vampires as those who come back from the grave to suck the blood or life essence from the living. This common understanding of vampires actually obscures many European and most non-European traditions of bloodsucking monsters. For example, in China, Japan, and the Middle East, there are spirits that will drain the life force of an unwary person, but these magical beings were never mortal humans. In African and Native American traditions, there are monsters that do the same, but while they are supposed to be of this Earth, they too are not human beings. Furthermore, folklore changes over time, so the vampires people are familiar with today (and the ones some people claim to actually meet) bear little resemblance to the vampires of early modern Europe. Stories change, fiction turns to fact and vice versa, and beliefs are constantly reinvented. Ideas are adopted, adapted, and presented as true. All the while, the legend of the vampire remains. The History and Folklore of Vampires chronicles how vampires became so popular. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about vampires like never before, in no time at all.
Even before Bram Stoker immortalized Transylvania as the homeland of his fictional Count Dracula, the figure of the vampire was inextricably tied to Eastern Europe in the popular imagination. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected sources, this book offers a fascinating account of how vampires—whose various incarnations originally emerged from folk traditions from all over the world—became so strongly identified with Eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the modern conception of the vampire was born in the crucible of the Enlightenment, embodying a mysterious, Eastern otherness that stood opposed to Western rationality. From the Prologue: From Original Sin to Eternal Life For a broad contemporary public, the vampire has become a star, a media sensation from Hollywood. Bestselling authors such as Bram Stoker, Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer continue to fire the imaginations of young and old alike, and bloodsuckers have achieved immortality through films like Dracula, Interview with a Vampireand Twilight. It is no wonder that, in the teenage bedrooms of our globalized world, vampires even steal the show from Harry Potter. They have long since been assigned individual personalities and treated with sympathy. They may possess superhuman powers, but they are also burdened by their immortality and have to learn to come to terms with their craving for blood. Whereas the Southeast European vampire, discovered in the 1730s, underwent an Americanization and domestication in the media landscape of the twentieth century, the creole zombies that first became known through the cheap novels and horror films of the 1920s still continue to serve as brainless horror figures. Do bloodsuckers really exist and should we really be afraid of the dead? These are the questions that I seek to tackle, following the wishes of my daughter, who was ten when I started this project.
A look at the forgotten ancestors of the modern-day vampire, many of which have very different characteristics • Looks at the many ancestoral forms of the modern vampire, including shroud eaters, appesarts, and stafi • Presents evidence for the reality of this phenomenon from pre-19th-century newspaper articles and judicial records Of all forms taken by the undead, the vampire wields the most powerful pull on the modern imagination. But the countless movies and books inspired by this child of the night who has a predilection for human blood are based on incidents recorded as fact in newspapers and judicial archives in the centuries preceding the works of Bram Stoker and other writers. Digging through these forgotten records, Claude Lecouteux unearths a very different figure of the vampire in the many accounts of individuals who reportedly would return from their graves to attack the living. These ancestors of the modern vampire were not all blood suckers; they included shroud eaters, appesarts, nightmares, and the curious figure of the stafia, whose origin is a result of masons secretly interring the shadow of a living human being in the wall of a building under construction. As Lecouteux shows, the belief in vampires predates ancient Roman times, which abounded with lamia, stirges, and ghouls. Discarding the tacked together explanations of modern science for these inexplicable phenomena, the author looks back to another folk belief that has come down through the centuries like that of the undead: the existence of multiple souls in every individual, not all of which are able to move on to the next world after death.
Throughout history vampires have been viewed as hideously repellant, strikingly attractive, dangerously evil, and piteously gloomy. This title explores vampire beliefs from the blood sucking beasts of ancient times to the immortal teen heartthrobs of the twenty-first century.
The author of A Guide to Haunted New England lifts the coffin lid on the region’s folklore and legends of the undead. New England is rich in history and mystery. Numerous sleepy little towns and farming communities distinguish the region’s scenic tranquility. But not long ago, New Englanders lived in fear of spectral ghouls believed to rise from their graves and visit family members in the night to suck their lives away. Although the word “vampire” was never spoken, scores of families disinterred loved ones during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries searching for telltale signs that one of them might be what is now referred to as the New England vampire. “In his remarkable book . . . Thomas D’Agostino details the longstanding belief among New Englanders that supernatural entities were responsible for the disease called consumption.”—Crime Capsule Includes photos! Praise for A Guide to Haunted New England “Fun, charming . . . includes not only locales with reported ghosts, but also sites with macabre (though not haunted) histories.”—True Crime Librarian “Anyone interested in exploring the haunted, macabre and abandoned throughout New England knows they can count on D’Agostino to find out more about the site’s history, past sightings and how to find them.”—Mobile RVing
An exploration of the continuing appeal of vampires in cultural and social history. Our enduring love of vampires—the bad boys (and girls) of paranormal fantasy—has persisted for centuries. Despite being bloodthirsty, heartless killers, vampire stories commonly carry erotic overtones that are missing from other paranormal or horror stories. Even when monstrous teeth are sinking into pale, helpless throats—especially then—vampires are sexy. But why? In A History Of The Vampire In Popular Culture, author Violet Fenn takes the reader through the history of vampires in “fact” and fiction, their origins in mythology and literature, and their enduring appeal on TV and film. We’ll delve into the sexuality--and sexism--of vampire lore, as well as how modern audiences still hunger for a pair of sharp fangs in the middle of the night.
