The Vampire In Nineteenth Century Literature

Carol A. Senf traces the vampire’s evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.

Against the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nineteenth century, the border-bending nosferatu embodied the period’s fears as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture, social upheaval, gender and sexuality, new knowledge and technology. The figure increased in popularity throughout the century and reached its climax in Dracula (1897), the most famous story of bloodsuckers. This book includes chapters on Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, as well as touchstone texts like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but it also focuses on the many “Other” vampire stories of the period. Topics discussed include: the long-war veteran and aristocratic vampire in Varney; the vampire as addict in fiction by George MacDonald; time discipline in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death; fragile female vampires in works by Eliza Lynn Linton; the gender and sexual contract in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne;” cultural appropriation in Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; as well as Caribbean vampires and the racialized Other in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. While drawing attention to oft-overlooked stories, this study ultimately highlights the vampire as a cultural shape-shifter whose role as “Other” tells us much about Victorian culture and readers’ fears or desires.

The definitive collection of 19th century,literature in which the vampire, or vampirism -,both embodied and atmospheric-appears. In a single,volume charged with sex, blood and horror, 17,seminal texts by legendary authors cover the whole,of that delirious period fom Gothic and Romanticthrough Symbolism and decadence to,proto-Surrealism and beyond.

This book sets the writings of Merimee, Le Fanu, Stoker and Verne in the context in which they were written - namely the response to Balkan, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian politics. Gibson analyzes their works to reveal that the vampire acts as an allegory of the Near East through which constitutes a challenge to the 'orientalism' argument of today.

This collection brings together key writings which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced, and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection anthologizes path-breaking essays on most aspects of gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media.

Bachelorarbeit aus dem Jahr 2015 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Note: 1,3, Universität Bayreuth, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: This paper aims to explain the development of the vampire in English literature from the 19th century to the present, from a merciless evil monster to a beautiful hero. I will examine this evolution according to the already explained reasons: the use of vampires as metaphors for their age and as figures who give readers the possibility to reflect themselves in them. To form a basis I will start with an investigation of the vampires’ origins in Eastern European folklore and the figures’ entry into literature. This chapter will also include an examination of reasons for the vampires’ constant popularity and development, with view to the observations of different researchers. Based on this I will examine the selected works in three categories. At first I will take a look at the shape of vampires, mainly focusing on their appearances and behavior and their connection to the corresponding ages. The next two chapters will concentrate on depictions of sexuality and gender, and of religion in the novels and how different treatments of these topics led to changing images of vampires. Reasons for the selection of these topics will be given in chapter two. Finally I will summarize my observations and check if the reasons for the development of the vampire, elaborated in the second chapter, are correct.

The long and distinguished tradition of the literary vampire began in Germany during the Age of Enlightenment. German literature was the first to adapt the vampire figure from central European folklore and superstition and give it literary form. Despite these German origins, scholarly attention devoted to literary vampires has consistently focused on a select set of sources: British and French literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the phenomenon of the vampire superstition in general. While there have been many illuminating studies of pre-literary vampires and vampires that have already been firmly established as literary figures, the story of the crucial moment of transition from folkloric figure to literary subject has not yet been told. In The Origins of the Literary Vampire Heide Crawford redirects scholarly attention to the body of German poetry and prose where vampire folklore becomes vampire literature. This book focuses on the adaptation of the vampire superstition from central European folklore by German poets in the 18th and early 19th centuries for an audience that had become increasingly interested in superstition and occult phenomena in an Age of Enlightenment. In addition to establishing that the origins of the literary vampire in 18th and 19th century German poetry and prose were informed by the stories and reports of vampires from Central Europe, Crawford argues that the German poets who adapted this figure from superstition for their creative work immediately molded it into a metaphor for contemporary cultural anxieties and fears—a connection that would inspire horror literature in general and the traits of the literary vampire in particular for the 19th century and beyond. Contemporary culture has exhibited a marked fascination with eroticized and politicized applications of the vampire. This volume traces these erotic motifs, common political motifs and others to the first vampire poems that were written by German poets. Consequently, this book answers three central questions: What were the origins of the literary vampire; how was the vampire of folklore and superstition adapted for literature; and how did German poets contribute to the development of the vampire and Gothic horror literature? By answering these and other questions, The Origins of the Literary Vampire explains how the literary vampire became the ubiquitous horror figure it is today.