![]() ![]() Today, Gothic courses are embraced, but vampire studies still require some explanation. Our approach is one which builds upon but in some ways moves away from the now conventional 'Gothic studies' approach in that the vampire, following Frayling, Gelder, and Auerbach, forms its own tradition and discipline. These two monographs pave the way for this research, which continues to document the interest in vampires within academic circles however, these new scholars are in the position to respond to more recent developments. Auerbach charts the progress of vampires through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as far as the 1980s, focussing on US culture during the Reagan years. Equally seminal and much-cited is Nina Auerbach's Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995). The rigour, imagination, and sheer scope of his research into vampires can be seen to have initiated the critical study of vampire texts.Īnother work, Ken Gelder's Reading the Vampire (1994), is seminal in its decipherment of the vampire in its cultural context from a range of theoretical perspectives (appropriately open-minded for such an elusive creature), but it appeared in 1994, necessarily excluding recent avatars of the humanised vampire in paranormal romance and Young Adult fiction. Back then, Frayling was the first to invite vampires into the academy, having just been given access to the newly discovered Dracula notebooks (Stoker's lost research notes for the novel). If you visit the British Library nowadays, you might struggle to find anyone who is not studying the Gothic. When, in the late 1970s, Sir Christopher Frayling was researching his book Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula in the reading room of the British Museum, Gothic studies hadn't yet entered the academy and vampires were not considered to be an appropriate topic for academic research. ![]() ![]() It is surprising then, given the recent vogue for vampires and all things undead, that there has never been up until now a special issue of Gothic Studies on vampires. More recently, their less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture. They have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. They have stalked texts from Marx's image of the leeching capitalist, through Pater's Lady Lisa of tainted knowledge, to the multifarious incarnations in contemporary fictions in print and on screen. Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century by Polidori, as Varney, and in Le Fanu and Stoker, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. ![]()
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