Description
For the last three hundred years, fictions of the vampire have fed off anxieties about cultural continuity. Though commonly represented as a parasitic aggressor from without, the vampire is in fact a native of Europe, and its metamorphoses, to quote Baudelaire, a distorted image of social transformation. Because the vampire grows strong whenever and wherever traditions weaken, its representations have multiplied with every political, economic, and technological revolution from the eighteenth century on. Today, in the age of globalization, vampire fictions are more virulent than ever, and the monster enjoys hunting grounds as vast as the international market. Metamorphoses of the Vampire explains why representations of vampirism began in the eighteenth century, flourished in the nineteenth, and came to eclipse nearly all other forms of monstrosity in the early twentieth century. Many of the works by French and German authors discussed here have never been presented to students and scholars in the English-speaking world. While there are many excellent studies that examine Victorian vampires, the undead in cinema, contemporary vampire fictions, and the vampire in folklore, until now no work has attempted to account for the unifying logic that underlies the vampire's many and often apparently contradictory forms. ~~~~~~ ERIK BUTLER holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University and has taught at Emory University and Swarthmore College. His publications include The Bellum Gramaticale and the Rise of European Literature (2010) and a translation with commentary of Regrowth (Vidervuks) by the Soviet Jewish author Der Nister (2011).
Review:
(C)overs a lot of ground... (E)specially informative for classroom use. Compared to other studies of vampirism ... (Butler's book) is less theory-heavy and more interested in historical changes that brought with them certain anxieties and apprehensions for which the vampire became an ideal and multi-faceted projection screen. MONATSHEFTE Butler brings to the feast ... a rare cross-cultural perspective... He also, and very convincingly, calls attention to the instability of genre that haunts vampire narratives ... Not merely a contribution to the cultural explication of the vampire, (this book) also touches on broader topics around the social transformations of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and it does so with elegance and intelligence. VICTORIAN STUDIES Butler's analyses of the development of vampire literature in the European tradition--most notably in France and Germany--are the most distinctive... A valuable contribution. CHOICE Butler's study shows conclusively that the term vampire represents a construct that has been exposed over the centuries to semantic and medial processes of change while mirroring and intensifying them in a cultural sense. At the same time the work shows that vampires as a popular export of the Hollywood film industry are returning above all to the place from which they emerged in the eighteenth century to conquer the world: to Europe. LITERATURKRITIK.DE Erik Butler, one of the most promising American comparatists of the last generation, has written an extremely enjoyable book. In lieu of psychoanalytic and genre-based approaches, Butler uses the tools of history and geography to read the figure of the vampire. His study might also be called: The Vampire: A Political History. According to the author, the overwhelming profusion of the undead in the European imagination is closely tied to the world turned upside-down by the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution. Even if the vampire takes the stage as a being from ancient times, its success stems from profound insecurities characteristic of the modern era, where birth no longer determines rank and the power of capital to transform the world seems to know no limits. ILSOLE24ORE.COM