Our Vampires, Ourselves (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Nina Auerbach
- First Published: 1995
- Type of Work: Literary history
- Time of Work: 1816 to the 1990’s
- Setting: Primarily Great Britain and the United States
- Principal Characters: Dracula, Varney, Carmilla, Lestat
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction
- Subjects: Folkloric or magical people, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Literature, Presidents, Vampires
- Locales: United States, Great Britain
While Nina Auerbach admits the significance of vampires in universal folk tales from time immemorial, her interest in “our vampires, ourselves”—as indicated by her title, with its witty allusion to another modern work of self-conscious sociology, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973)—lies in tracing the evolution of the vampire myth in modern Western society. She begins with the English Romantics, locating the origins of Anne Rice’s appealing contemporary vampire, Lestat, in George Gordon, Lord Byron. Byron’s “Fragment of a...
[The entire page is 1886 words long]
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