Vampyres Genesis And Resurrection From Count Dracula To Vampirella

Christopher Frayling has spent 45 years exploring the history of one of the most enduring figures in the history of mass culture the vampire. Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of Eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. Frayling recounts the most significant moments in gothic history, while extracts from a huge range of sources including Bram Stokers detailed research notes for Dracula, penny dreadfuls and Angela Carters The Bloody Chamber, new to this edition are contextualized and analysed. This revised and expanded edition brings Vampyres up to date with 21st-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary and a revised introduction. For the first time, Christopher Frayling also explores the development of the vampire in the visual arts in four colour-plate sections, with illustrations ranging from 18th-century prints to 21st-century film stills, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the vampire from popular press to fine art and, finally, to film.

An expanded, fully illustrated, and up-to-date edition of the classic cultural history of vampires Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. It incorporates extracts from a huge range of sources—from Bram Stoker’s detailed research notes for Dracula to penny dreadfuls, to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (new to this edition) which is analyzed by the author in a broader cultural context. This revised and expanded edition of the 1978 classic brings Vampyres up to date with twenty-first-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary, and a revised introduction. For the first time, Christopher Frayling also explores the development of the vampire in the visual arts in four color-plate sections, with illustrations ranging from eighteenth-century prints to twenty-first-century film stills, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the vampire from popular press to fine art and, finally, to film.

Grab a stake, a fistful of garlic, a crucifix and holy water as you enter the dark, blood-curdling world of the original pain in the neck in this ultimate collection of vampire facts, fangs, and fiction! What accounts for the undying fascination people have for vampires? How did encounters with death create centuries-old myths and folklore in virtually every culture in the world? When did the early literary vampires—as pictured by Goethe, Coleridge, Shelly, Polidori, Byron, and Nodier as the personifications of man’s darker side—transform from villains into today’s cultural rebels? Showing how vampire-like creatures organically formed in virtually every part of the world, The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History by renowned religion expert and fearless vampire authority J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D., examines the historic, societal, and psychological role the vampire has played—and continues to play—in understanding death, man’s deepest desires, and human pathologies. It analyzes humanity’s lusts, fears, and longing for power and the forbidden! Today, the vampire serves as a powerful symbol for the darker parts of the human condition, touching on death, immortality, forbidden sexuality, sexual power and surrender, intimacy, alienation, rebellion, violence, and a fascination with the mysterious. The vampire is often portrayed as a symbolic leader advocating an outrageous alternative to the demands of conformity. Vampires can also be tools for scapegoating such as when women are called “vamps” and bosses are described as “bloodsuckers.” Meet all of the villains, anti-heroes, and heroes of myths, legends, books, films, and television series across cultures and today’s pop culture in The Vampire Almanac. It assembles and analyzes hundreds of vampiric characters, people, and creatures, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vlad the Impaler, Edward Cullen and The Twilight Saga, Bram Stoker, Lestat De Lioncourt and The Vampire Chronicles, Lon Chaney, True Blood, Bela Lugosi, Dracula, Dark Shadows, Lilith, Vampire Weekend, Batman, Nosferatu, and so many more. There is a lot to sink your teeth into with this deep exhumation of the undead. Quench your thirst for facts, histories, biographies, definitions, analysis, immortality, and more! This gruesomely thorough book of vampire facts also has a helpful bibliography, an extensive index, and numerous photos, adding to its usefulness.

‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is a celebration and a critical study of F. W. Murnau’s seminal vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens on the 100th anniversary of its release in 1922.The movie remains a dark mirror to the troubled world we live in seeing it as striking and important in the 2020s as it was a century ago. The unmistakable image of Count Orlok has traveled from his dilapidated castle in old world Transylvania into the futuristic depths of outerspace in Star Trek and beyondas the all-consuming shadow of the vampire spreads ever wider throughout contemporary popular culture. This innovative collection of essays, with a foreword by renowned Dracula expert Gary D. Rhodes, brings together experts in the field alongside creative artists to explore the ongoing impact of Murnau’s groundbreaking movie as it has been adapted, reinterpreted, and recreated across multiple mediums from theatre, performance and film, to gaming, music and even drag. As such, ‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is not only a timely and essential book about Murnau’s film but also illuminates the times that produced it and the world it continues to influence.

The Land Between Two Seas: Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea 1300-1700 focuses on the strong riverine ties that connect the seas of the Mediterranean system (from the Western Mediterranean through the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov) and their hinterland. Addressing the mediating role of the Balkans between East and West all the way to Poland and Lithuania, as well as this region’s contribution to the larger Mediterranean artistic and cultural melting pot, this innovative volume explores ideas, artworks and stories that moved through these territories linking the cultures of Central Asia with those of western Europe.

This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her ‘type’. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human – particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity – the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

Slavic cultures are far-ranging, comprising of East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland) and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria), yet they are connected by tales of adventure and magic with deep roots in a common lore. In this first collection of Slavic myths for an international readership, Noah Charney and Svetlana Slapak expertly weave together a retelling of the ancient stories with nuanced analysis that illuminates their place at the heart of Slavic tradition. Though less familiar to us than the legends of ancient Egypt, Greece and Scandinavia, in the world of Slavic mythology we find much that we can recognize: petulant deities, demons and faeries; witches, the sinister vestica, whose magic may harm or heal; a supreme god who can summon storms and hurl thunderbolts. Gods gather under the World Tree, reminiscent of Norse mythologys Yggdrasill; or, after the coming of Christianity, congregate among the clouds. The vampire usually the only Serbo-Croatian word in any foreign-language dictionary and the werewolf emerge from the shallow graves of Slavic belief. In their careful analysis and sensitive reconstructions of the origin stories, Charney and Slapsak unearth the Slavic beliefs before their distortion first by Christian chroniclers and then by 19th-century scholars seeking origin stories for their new-born nation states. They reveal links not only to the neighbouring pantheons of Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia but also the belief systems of indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia. In so doing, they draw out the universalities that cut across cultures in the stories we tell ourselves.