Review Essay: The vampire before and after Stoker's 'Dracula'

Abstract

Review of Paul Barber. 'Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality'. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Pb ix + 236pp. ISBN 0-300-04859-9, Carol A. Senf. 'The Vampire in 19th Century Literature'. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Pb vii + 204pp. ISBN 0-87972-425-0, and Brian J. Frost. 'The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature'. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Pb viii + 152. ISBN 087972 460 9. Although this is a review rather than a survey of three related but not overlapping volumes and of their place in the evolving lore of the vampire, they can, in a suitable sense, be treated in the general order in which they are listed above, not least since Paul Barber's engrossing 1990 text, 'Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality' serves as a fine introduction to a socio-cultural field which is treated very thoroughly in its major printed disquisition by Carol Senfs 'The Vampire' in 19th Century English Literature (1988), and finally in the multimedia, multi-disciplinary survey by Brian J. Frost, 'The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature' (1989). Significantly all three volumes come from North American university presses, as is more than appropriate since that continent, perhaps more than any other, has accepted and developed this age-old (European) heritage and helped it to evolve in ways that are consonant both with its folklore of migrant genesis and with the post-modern popular culture and legends of the later twentieth century.