Publication date:
04 October 2013Length of book:
276 pagesPublisher
Fairleigh Dickinson University PressISBN-13: 9781611475821
In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Brodman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and Russian vampires in popular culture, and the vampire in contemporary novels, film and television. The essays in this collection continue that multi-cultural and multigeneric discussion by tracing the development of the post-modern vampire, in films ranging from Shadow of a Doubt to Blade, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Interview with the Vampire; the male and female vampires in the Twilight films, Sookie Stackhouse novels and TrueBlood television series; the vampire in African American women’s fiction, Anne Rice’s novels and in the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend; vampires in Japanese anime; and finally, to bring the volumes full circle, the presentation of a new Irish Dracula play, adapted from the novel and set in 1888.
As John Dryden might have said, had he lived in an alternate universe, 'Here is Satan's plenty.' Brodman and Doan have assembled a collection of 16 essays by diverse hands as a companion to their edited volume The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (2012). That first volume focuses on vampires up through Stoker's Dracula, and this new collection offers an eclectic variety of essays focused on modern incarnations of the vampire in print and film, organized in three sections: 'The Vampire in Modern Film,' 'Race, Gender and the Vampire,' and 'New Readings of the Vampire.' Not surprisingly, the collection contains no fewer than five essays devoted to the Twilight series (and several more that refer to it). Reading through the essays is rather like attending a conference on vampires, literature, and film. . . .Perhaps the most significant contributions are Zélie Asava's and Marie-Luise Loeffler's brief essays on the depiction of black vampires. Also notable is the editors' dramatic reimagining of Dracula set in Ireland. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.