The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature

About this book

In his Preface to The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature James Twitchell writes that he is not interested in the current generation of vampires which he finds "rude boring and hopelessly adolescent. However they have not always been this way. In fact a century ago they were often quite sophisticated used by artists varied as Blake Poe Coleridge the Brontes Shelley and Keats to explain aspects of interpersonal relations. However vulgar the vampire has since become it is important to remember that along with the Frankenstein monster the vampire is one of the major mythic figures bequeathed to us by the English Romantics. Simply in terms of cultural influence and currency the vampire is far more important than any other nineteenth-century archetypes; in fact he is probably the most enduring and prolific mythic figure we have. This book traces the vampire out of folklore into serious art until he stabilizes early in this century into the character we all too easily recognize.