A History Of The Vampire In Popular Culture

Download or read book A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture written by Violet Fenn and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Postmodern Vampires written by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture is the first major study to focus on American cultural history from the vampire’s point of view. Beginning in 1968, Ní Fhlainn argues that vampires move from the margins to the centre of popular culture as representatives of the anxieties and aspirations of their age. Mapping their literary and screen evolution on to the American Presidency, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this essential critical study chronicles the vampire’s blood-ties to distinct socio-political movements and cultural decades in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through case studies of key texts, including Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys, Blade, Twilight, Let Me In, True Blood and numerous adaptations of Dracula, this book reveals how vampires continue to be exemplary barometers of political and historical change in the American imagination. It is essential reading for scholars and students in Gothic and Horror Studies, Film Studies, and American Studies, and for anyone interested in the articulate undead.

Download or read book The Global Vampire written by Cait Coker and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.

Download or read book Such a Dark Thing written by M. Jess Peacock and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-02-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evil, death, demons, reanimation, and resurrection. While such topics are often reserved for the darker mindscapes of the vampire subgenre within popular culture, they are equally integral elements of religious history and belief. Despite the cultural shift of presenting vampires in a secular light, the traditional figure of the vampire within cinema and literature has a rich legacy of serving as a theological marker. Whether as a symbol of the allure of sin, as an apologetic for assorted religious icons, or as a gateway into a discussion of liberationist theology, the vampire has served as a spiritual touchstone from Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Stephen King's Salem's Lot, to the HBO television series True Blood. In Such a Dark Thing, Jess Peacock examines how the figure of the vampire is able to traverse and interconnect theology and academia within the larger popular culture in a compelling and engaging manner. The vampire straddles the ineffable chasm between life and death and speaks to the transcendent in all of us, tapping into our fundamental curiosity of what, if anything, exists beyond the mortal coil, giving us a glimpse into the interminable while maintaining a cultural currency that is never dead and buried.

Download or read book Vampire Forensics written by Mark Collins Jenkins and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Jenkins’s engrossing history draws on the latest science, anthropological and archaeological research to explore the origins of vampire stories, providing gripping historic and folkloric context for the concept of immortal beings who defy death by feeding on the lifeblood of others. From the earliest whispers of eternal evil in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, vampire tales flourished through the centuries and around the globe, fueled by superstition, sexual mystery, fear of disease and death, and the nagging anxiety that demons lurk everywhere. In Vampire Forensics, Mark Jenkins probes vampire legend to tease out the historical truths enshrined in the tales of terror: sherds of Persian pottery depicting blood-sucking demons; the amazing recent discovery by National Geographic archaeologist Matteo Borrini of a 16th-century Venetian grave of a plague victim and suspected vampire; and the Transylvanian castle of "Vlad the Impaler," whose bloodthirsty cruelty remains unsurpassed. Jenkins navigates centuries of lore and legend, adding new chapters to the chronicle and weaving an irresistibly seductive blend of superstition, psychology, and science sure to engross everyone from Anne Rice’s countless readers to serious students of archaeology and mythology.

Download or read book The Vampire written by Nick Groom and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture written by William Patrick Day and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent decades that they have become a central part of American culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture looks at how vampire stories -- from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi's films to Love at First Bite -- have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human. William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well as how many post-modern vampire stories reflect our fear and attraction to stories of addiction and violence. He argues that contemporary stories use the character of Dracula to explore modern values, and that stories of vampire slayers, such as the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, integrate current feminist ideas and the image of the Vietnam veteran into a new heroic version of the vampire story.