Drumlin N.M. Crape and Brooke Cameron’s Disability, Illness, and the Vampire in Literature and Culture is an edited collection of essays addressing a wide range of literary depictions of vampirism and disability, from early and formative Victorian vampire stories like Eric Stenbock’s ‘The True Story of a Vampire’ (1894) and Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire (1852) to contemporary depictions across media forms, including the novels that comprise Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles (1976–2018), television shows like The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017) and Midnight Mass (2021), and recent video games like V Rising (2022).
In addition to this breadth of vampires and vampire stories included, this collection emphasizes a broad and multifaceted understanding of disability that is critical of the historical and ongoing ways that ableism and rigid ideas about normalcy have linked monsters like vampires to disabled people.
By critically examining the way disability is presented in vampire stories, the work of this collection’s contributors speaks to evolving ideas of who counts as human—and of what, exactly, the figure of the vampire has to teach us about our own humanity.
Table of Contents:
Foreword Introduction: The Vampire and Disability Section 1: Disabled vampire embodiment Chapter 1. Anne Rice’s Liminal Women Vampires – Impairment and Power Chapter 2. The Duality of the Deaf Vampire in Peter Wolf’s Deafula (1975) Chapter 3. Violet Hunt's Vampire, Reversed Chapter 4. ‘Render her a tempting morsel’: Unholy Appetites and Disordered Bodies in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire Chapter 5. Queer Teen/Vamp Love in an Ableist World Section 2: Narrating the disabled vampire Chapter 6. Nervous Vampirism and Narrative Disability in ‘The True Story of a Vampire’ by Eric Stenbock Chapter 7. Russian Literary Vampire: a Lonely Demon or a Disabled Man? Chapter 8. The Mechanics of Marginality: Making Vampires from Video Game Players in V Rising Chapter 9. Narrating Disability in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ Section 3: Invisible disability, mental health, and the vampire Chapter 10. ‘My Own Mind is a Demon that Haunts Me’: The Dawn of the Bipolar Vampire Chapter 11. Vampirism and/as Mental Illness: Martin and The Transfiguration Chapter 12. The Autistic Vampire Chapter 13. Memories that Haunt: Traumatic Histories in Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire (1852) Chapter 14. Caregiving and the Disabled Female Body in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “Luella Miller" Section 4: Reimagining vampirism Chapter 15. Bloody Bitch: The Deviant Biofictions of Countess Elizabeth Báthory Chapter 16. 'The Vampyre of Time and Memory’: Vampirism and Trauma in Tana French’s In the Woods Chapter 17. 'You stole from me! Not just who I was, but who I could’ve been.’: Intersections of Disability, Time, and Child Vampirism in Midnight Mass (2021) and Interview with a Vampire (1994) and (2022) Chapter 18. 'It’s like being stuck indoors with the flu watching daytime television, forever and ever’: Chronic Illness and Crip Time in Catherine Jinks’ The Reformed Vampire Support Group
About the Author :
Drumlin N.M. Crape is a PhD candidate in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Canada.
Brooke Cameron is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada.
