Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan Introduction The Vampire in Modern Film Victoria Williams 1 - Reflecting Dracula: The Un-dead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt Murray Leeder 2 - “A Species of One”: The Atavistic Vampire from Dracula to The Wisdom of Crocodiles Melissa Olson 3 - Dracula the Anti-Christ: New Resurrection of an Immortal Prejudice Simon Bacon 4 - Eat Me! The Morality of Hunger in Vampiric Cuisine Race, Gender and the Vampire Donna Mitchell 5 - The Madonna and Child: Re-Evaluating Social Conventions through Anne Rice’s Forgotten Females Karin Hirmer 6 - Female Empowerment: Buffy and Her Heiresses in Control Cheyenne Mathews 7 - Lightening “The White Man’s Burden”: Evolution of the Vampire from the Victorian Racialism of Dracula to the New World Order of I Am Legend Zélie Asava 8 - “You’re Nothing to Me But Another... [White] Vampire”: A Study of the Representation of the Black Vampire in American Mainstream Cinema Marie-Luise Loeffler 9 - “She Would Be No Man’s Property Ever Again”: Vampirism, Slavery, and Black Female Heroism in Contemporary African American Women’s Fiction New Readings of the Vampire Alaina Steiner 10 - Blood-Abstinent Vampires & the Women Who Consume Them Ben Murnane 11 - “Exactly My Brand of Heroin”: Contexts and the Creation of the Twilight Phenomenon Hope Jennings and Christine Wilson 12 - Disciplinary Lessons: Myth, Female Desire, and the Monstrous Maternal in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series Sarah Heaton 13 - Vampire Vogue and Female Fashion: Dressing Skin and Dressing-up in the Sookie Stackhouse and Twilight Series Batia Stolar 14 - The Politics of Reproduction in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga Burcu Genç 15 - The Vampire from an Evolutionary Perspective in Japanese Animation: Blood+ James E. Doan and Barbara Brodman 16 - Adapting Dracula to an Irish Context: Reconfiguring the Universal Vampire About the Contributors Index

About the Author :
Barbara Brodman is professor of humanities at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She holds master's and doctoral degrees in Hispanic languages and literature, Latin American studies, and international business and has published a variety of scholarly works that deal with international arts and affairs. James E. Doan is professor of humanities at Nova Southeastern University, where he teaches courses in literature, the arts, folklore and mythology, including a course on the vampire which he has taught for some twenty years.

Review :
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.