Open Graves, Open Minds : Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day

Abstract

This collection of essays relates the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change. It covers the Enlightenment investigation of vampires by Dom Augustin Calmet-the source of many later vampire narratives-through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to the classic tales of Le Fanu's Carmilla and Stoker's Dracula. Further essays discuss the vampire in the context of fin-de-siècle decadence and Oscar Wilde before an examination of the cinematic treatments up to Coppola's Dracula, where the sympathetic vampire appears for the first time. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, young adult fiction (including, of course, Twilight), cinema, and the Internet are dealt with in chapters on True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Marcus Sedgwick, and the undead in technology