Vampires have never been as popular in Western culture as they are now: Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and their fans have secured the vampire's place in contemporary culture. Yet the role vampires play in how we remember our pasts and configure our futures has yet to be explored. The present volume fills this gap, addressing the many ways in which vampire narratives have been used to describe the tensions between memory and identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The first part of the volume considers the use of the vampire to deal with rapid cultural change, both to remember the past and to imagine possible futures. The second part examines vampire narratives as external cultural archives, a memory library allowing us to reference the past and understand how this underpins our present. Finally, the collection explores how the undead comes to embody memorial practice itself: an autonomous entity that gives form to traumatic, feminist, postcolonial and oral traditions and reveals the resilience of minority memory.
Ranging from actual reports of vampire activity to literary and cinematic interpretations of the blood-drinking revenant, this timely study investigates the ways in which the «undead memory» of the vampire throughout Western culture has helped us to remember more clearly who we were, who we are, and who we will/may become.
Simon Bacon is an independent researcher and Network Manager - Conferences for Inter-Disciplinary.Net as well as the editor of the journal Monsters and the Monstrous. He has published extensively on vampires in popular culture and is currently working on a monograph on alternative readings of the undead.
Katarzyna Bronk is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. She teaches the history of English literature but her research focuses on the history of sin/virtue, sexuality and gender, and, in particular, representations of women and femininity in English history and culture.
Vampires have never been as popular in Western culture as they are now: Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and their fans have secured the vampire's place in contemporary culture. Yet the role vampires play in how we remember our pasts and configure our futures has yet to be explored. The present volume fills this gap, addressing the many ways in which vampire narratives have been used to describe the tensions between memory and identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The first part of the volume considers the use of the vampire to deal with rapid cultural change, both to remember the past and to imagine possible futures. The second part examines vampire narratives as external cultural archives, a memory library allowing us to reference the past and understand how this underpins our present. Finally, the collection explores how the undead comes to embody memorial practice itself: an autonomous entity that gives form to traumatic, feminist, postcolonial and oral traditions and reveals the resilience of minority memory.
Ranging from actual reports of vampire activity to literary and cinematic interpretations of the blood-drinking revenant, this timely study investigates the ways in which the «undead memory» of the vampire throughout Western culture has helped us to remember more clearly who we were, who we are, and who we will/may become.
Simon Bacon is an independent researcher and Network Manager - Conferences for Inter-Disciplinary.Net as well as the editor of the journal Monsters and the Monstrous. He has published extensively on vampires in popular culture and is currently working on a monograph on alternative readings of the undead.
Katarzyna Bronk is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. She teaches the history of English literature but her research focuses on the history of sin/virtue, sexuality and gender, and, in particular, representations of women and femininity in English history and culture.
Contents: Sir Christopher Frayling: Foreword – Leo Ruickbie: Memento (non)mori: Memory, Discourse and Transmission during the Eighteenth-Century Vampire Epidemic and After – Marius Crişan: Vampire Narratives as Juggling with Romanian History: Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian – Naomi Segal: André Gide, Nosferatu and the Hydraulics of Youth and Age – Hadas Elber-Aviram: Constitutional Amnesia and Future Memory: Science Fiction’s Posthuman Vampire – Katharina Rein: Archives of Horror: Carriers of Memory in Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Enrique Ajuria Ibarra: Vampire Echoes and Cannibal Rituals: Undead Memory, Monstrosity and Genre in J. M. Grau’s We Are What We Are – Sorcha Ní Fhlainn: «Old things, fine things»: Of Vampires, Antique Dealers and Timelessness – Hannah Priest: Pack versus Coven: Guardianship of Tribal Memory in Vampire versus Werewolf Narratives – Angela Tumini: Death and the City: Repressed Memory and Unconscious Anxiety in Michael Almereyda’s Nadja – Simon Bacon: The Inescapable Moment: The Vampire as Individual and Collective Trauma in Let Me In by Matt Reeves.
Simon Bacon is an independent researcher and Network Manager –
Conferences for Inter-Disciplinary.Net as well as the editor of the
journal Monsters and the Monstrous. He has published extensively on
vampires in popular culture and is currently working on a monograph
on alternative readings of the undead.
Katarzyna Bronk is Assistant Professor in the Department of English
Literature and Literary Linguistics, Faculty of English, Adam
Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. She teaches the history of
English literature but her research focuses on the history of
sin/virtue, sexuality and gender, and, in particular,
representations of women and femininity in English history and
culture.
«Der Sammelband bereichert die Fantastikforschung und Vampirwissenschaft um Einzelanalysen von bekannten und weniger bekannten Werken aus dem Vampirgenre unter den bislang wenig beachteten Aspekten von Zeit und Erinnerung. [...] Der Sammelband bietet summa summarum einen lesenswerten Einstieg in einen bislang wenig beachteten Themenbereich und liefert viele Anregungen für weitere Forschungen.» (Janina Scholz, ZS für Fantastikforschung 2, 2014)
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