The Vampire : A New History / Nick Groom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Groom, Nick, 1966- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Vampires.

Vampires--History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xix, 287 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations (some color).

Place of Publication:

New Haven, Connecticut : Yale University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

An authoritative new history of the vampire, two hundred years after it first appeared on the literary scene Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori's publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom's detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind's fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.

Contents:

Introduction : Creating : Thinking with vampires

Part I : Circulating : The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Unearthing the dead : Medicine and detection, body and mind

The lands of blood : Place and race, territory and travel

Ghostly theology : Rational religion, spiritual reason

The covenant of the undead : Catholicism and enlightenment, Sanctity and danger

Part II : Coagulating : The nineteenth century to the present

The cultures of death : Gothic romanticism, deathly words

Mortal pathologies : Being bestial, living lies

Bleeding gold : Gothic capitalism and undead consumerism

The count, Dracula : Smoke and mirrors - Pen, paint and blood

Conclusion : Crawling and Creeping : Living with vampires.

Notes:

Includes bibliographic references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

0-300-24081-3

OCLC:

1083583405