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The contemporary understanding of the vampire trope is not solely a literary construct but also the outcome of its theatrical adaptations, often following closely after the publication of the seminal works that shaped the myth. Despite the occasional reading of vampires as tragic figures, works featuring these creatures have yet to be staged as tragedies, translating instead to melodramas and musicals. This article examines theatrical renditions of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), demonstrating that although these literary works offer varying interpretations of the vampire trope, they consistently diverge from the tragic form once they are adapted for the stage. At the same time, vampires represent a world of post-tragic plots, where tragedy is impossible since they live too long after the tragic event had already occurred. The authors argue that staging of vampire narratives coincides with historical contexts in which audiences experience disillusionment with tragedy’s promise of catharsis, opting instead to look to other dramatic formulas for a reflection of their times. While tragedies often depict the protagonist’s downfall due to an internal fatal flaw, vampire melodramas and musicals, in most cases, explore the collective trauma caused by external flaws, thus resonating more with the social and cultural milieu of their times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the Victorian period, eating disorders have been influenced by patriarchal discourses that monitor women’s bodies. Female vampires in Victorian Gothic narratives—e.g., Dracula (1897) and Carmilla (1872)—transitioned from a restrained, anorexic body to an insatiable, voluptuous one. Contemporary vampire teen dramas—including the Twilight saga (2005–2008), or the TV series The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017) and Vampire Academy (2022)—are also a reflection of their socio-cultural time of production, thus featuring dubious and postfeminist representations of female hunger and eating disorders that mirror our post-postmodern gender and identity politics. In this article, I examine how the transformation of the female protagonists in The Vampire Diaries from slender, proper girls to voracious vampires could be understood as a patriarchal demonisation of women’s (sexual) appetite, particularly in the case of Vicki Donovan and Elena Gilbert, but also as a source of empowerment for Caroline Forbes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barbu Cioculescu, co-translator of the 1990 Romanian rendition of Bram Stoker's Dracula alongside Ileana Verzea, has claimed that their rendition marked the Romanian audience's first interaction with Stoker's magnum opus. In 2005 and 2009, however, scholarly articles surfaced positing the existence of an overlooked interwar translation. Nearly a decade later, this lost translation resurfaced through the efforts of a minor publishing house, which published it in book-length form in 2023. Serialized between 1928 and 1929, this newly rediscovered rendition, authored by Romanian poet and prose writer Ion Gorun, stands among the earliest ten translations internationally, predating the novel's publication in Ireland, Stoker's homeland, by half a decade. This study explores the rediscovery and peculiarities of Gorun's rendition, concurrently examining the socio-historical milieu surrounding its original release and elucidating the factors contributing to its century-long elusiveness. Furthermore, the study shows that, despite promoting Stoker's novel as being set in Transylvania, Gorun's translation tends to de-exoticize the Irish writer's portrayal of the region, either for fear of censorship or to circumvent confusion and disapproval among the local audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revue des Lettres Modernes is the property of Classiques Garnier and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is devoted to the analysis of mythological foundations of mass culture and their role in the formation of political discourse through the images of fantastic characters reflecting archetypal motifs and emotionally affecting the collective unconscious. Three universal approaches to the creation of fantastic characters in mass culture are described: chimerization, gorgonization and cyborgization. The interaction between political discourse and the fantasy segment of mass culture is examined through the prism of the digimodern aesthetics described by Alan Kirby. The author explores how figures of monsters, zombies, mutants and other fantastic creatures become allegories of social, cultural and political processes. Particular attention is paid to the possibility of the fantasy story to discuss such pressing social issues as minority rights, the crises of capitalism, multiculturalism, and the nature of future revolutions. It also analyzes the conceptual component of the phenomenon of “soft power” of cinema in the context of shaping public opinion both inside and outside Western countries. It is emphasized that the “ideological elasticity” of fiction formats creates a space for safe and politically correct discussion of complex topics. The article may be of interest to researchers studying the interaction between mass culture and political processes, as well as the processes of myth-making in cinematography.

Themes and figures that originated in the literature of previous centuries are present in contemporary novels, with certain changes related to the evolution of the mentality of the society within which said novels were written. The vampire, more specifically, has been an element typically used to represent a danger to human beings in relation to sexuality and religion, particularly for young women. This representation has been maintained in the literature published today, with some relevant variations that offer a different point of view regarding this figure. Polidori's Lord Ruthven and Meyer's Edward Cullen are part of the same tradition, being two figures who cover the same topics, although from very different focuses. Both cases present a complicated morality; while the former rejoices in his wickedness, the latter constantly suffers for his condition. Beyond their internal characteristics, these two personifications of the vampire as a monster also present a series of common physical traits since one is the consequence of the other. This paper aims to prove that the feelings Ruthven and Cullen experience towards their vampirism is a representation of the socio-cultural background in which they were created. While Polidori's monster is presented as evil and damned, thus representing sinfulness, Meyer's creature is presented as a suffering and romanticised figure who atones for his nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the earliest refutations of the Visum et Repertum (1732) by Johann Flückinger was from Johann Wilhelm Nöbling, a young student of philosophy and theology at the University of Jena, who attacked the findings from a position of scientific scepticism enshrouded with Lutheran theology in his thesis Concerning the Blood-Sucking Corpses of those so-called Vampires or People-Suckers. While he is best remembered for first proposing the incubus or nightmare of sleep paralysis as being the real cause of the superstition, his major contribution was theological, concerning the relation between body and soul. And yet while Nöbling provides a rigorous, scripture-based denial of vampirism, his framework necessarily accommodates contemporary medical theory, demonstrating both the adaptation of theology to science and the extent to which pneumatology still inhered in scientific enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology is the property of Issues in Ethnology Anthropology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Since 1947 and Siegfried Kracauer's seminal From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Weimar Film Studies has been dominated by discussions on the representation of power, which has only recently begun to fall away. This article breaks away from this tradition and contributes to a new range of approaches to Weimar cinema, which centre upon figures belonging to a group that has largely been excluded from the existing narrative: 'the Jew'. Though Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) does not contain any characters explicitly identified as Jewish, I consider how the titular character is imbued with antisemitic tropes and thus steps into a similar role as enemy of mainstream German society. This article thus explores the notion of antisemitism as a socially generated projection formulated in response to the social experience of modernity, projected onto a representative of 'Jewishness' as the ultimate enemy of the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While genre hybridity in television and cinema is nothing new, Copenhagen Cowboy (2023), the six-episode Netflix series co-created – with screenwriter Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde – and directed by Danish auteur filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, is remarkable for the way its mixture of genres is both a continuation of the hybrid approach already established in Refn's cinema work (and in his first streaming series, for Amazon Studios, Too Old to Die Young [2019]) and a kind of meta-commentary on it. Copenhagen Cowboy was pitched to Netflix as a continuation of Refn's Pusher trilogy, a series of grittily realistic gangster films set in Copenhagen's criminal underworld. However, with the series Refn also wished to introduce elements of other genres, including science fiction: as he told Netflix, the series would climax with 'a spaceship at the end'. Although Refn has described his psychedelic Viking adventure Valhalla Rising (2009) as a 'science fiction film', this comment seems to reflect more the creative process involved in making it than the narrative presented on-screen; Copenhagen Cowboy represents his first explicit foray into the realm of science fiction. However, it is science fiction of a particular kind: superhero science fiction and I discuss the series here as, ultimately, a superhero narrative; 'ultimately' because its nature as a superhero text is only truly revealed in the final episode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review analyzes the vampire plague that devastated Eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries from the perspective of enlightened medicine of its time, which provided a positivist approach to the various manifestations of death. All this at a time when public health, related to the spread of epidemics and linked to hygiene in burials, was very precarious and the issue of death was not adequately legislated, with premature burials being frequent. Eighteenth-century European vampirism was understood as demonic possession of the corpse or as the inability of the spirit of the deceased to leave this plane of existence, being condemned to unleash a terrible plague. Faced with the problem of the singular appearance of the different types of "living dead" when exhumed, only the beginning of putrefaction was a real guarantee of physical death, at a time when the cadaveric decomposition process was not known. In any case, during the "vampire epidemic" that devastated the territory of the Habsburgs, few doctors took the existence of these "preternatural" beings seriously, directing their rationalizing efforts to deny them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long tradition of aligning vampires with media, dating back to Dracula’s defeat by humans using modern communication technologies. This article examines an earlier, more elemental vampire in J.R. Planché’s 1820 stage melodrama The Vampire. Planché’s play was staged during a period when the definition of media was shifting from the natural elements toward human communication technologies. Building on John Durham Peters’ expanded notion of media as encompassing bodies and environments as well as minds and communication technologies, this article reads Planché’s nonhuman characters – spirits of the air and water and a vampire who disappears into the stage – as somewhere between characters and scenery. By showing how these nonhuman characters align with the melodrama’s pictorial renderings of environment in its ‘vision’ scene, the article suggests how the elemental both orders and complicates modes of signification grounded in the social world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, vision scenes became less elemental and more psychological in later melodramas such as David Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871). The Vampire’s vision scene thus suggests the elemental underpinnings of later melodramatic conventions for representing inner life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this text is to briefly determine certain apotropaic mechanisms directed against vampirization in the Balkans. From the wide corpus of such practices, the archaeological findings are singled out, through which one can gain an insight into how people protected themselves from the dangerous dead in a certain historical period; and with the help of ethnological and folklore literature followed by archival materials, plants, animals and rituals are contextualized as central elements in terms of prevention and protection from the folklore vampire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Muiraquitã: Revista de Letras e Humanidades is the property of Muiraquita and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)